Ten years in the past, Susan Wojcicki drew on an historic instance of epic failure and a newer instance of smashing success for key classes in management.
The previous YouTube CEO handed away on Friday after two years of dwelling with lung most cancers. A Silicon Valley pioneer, she spent greater than 20 years main numerous elements of Google and its mum or dad firm Alphabet.
On the 2014 graduation ceremony for the UCLA Anderson Faculty of Administration, the place she earned her MBA in 1998, Wojcicki recounted the speech from her personal Anderson commencement.
The speaker was then-U.S. Filter CEO Richard Heckmann, who died in 2020. Whereas he talked in regards to the Titanic and 10 take-aways from its notorious sinking in 1912, there was one which stood out and continued to resonate all through her profession.
“It’s possible to be very wrong,” Wojcicki informed the graduates.
Whereas the Titanic had the newest know-how on the time and was deemed unsinkable, hubris prompted the ship to hit an iceberg and sink, she added.
Wojcicki considered that lesson as she was serving to to construct up Google and throughout the dot-com crash, when she typically drove by empty buildings that when housed outstanding web corporations.
“And I thought to myself, it’s possible to be very wrong,” she recalled. “It turns out that that was true for Google as a small company, but it’s even more true for us now that we’re larger. When big companies fall, they fall much harder. When you’re steering a big ship, it turns out it’s even harder to see the icebergs. When you do, it’s even harder to turn the ship around to avoid those icebergs and steer away.”
Pointing to how the smartphone revolution instantly upended the web panorama, Wojcicki urged the viewers to embrace change and pivoted to a administration lesson from the 2013 Disney film Frozen.
A key consider its success was that Disney embraced YouTube, she defined. After it hit theaters, followers started importing their very own covers of the film’s signature music “Let It Go” to YouTube.
Disney may have simply requested the platform to take down these movies, however as a substitute the leisure big selected to embrace change and respect its viewers, Wojcicki mentioned. “Quite simply, they let it go.”
Any business will face change, presenting stark penalties for companies as new applied sciences emerge and client preferences change, she added.
“It feels unusual, our instinct is to fight it. Be we need to embrace it. We need to let it go,” she mentioned.
In 2016, Wojcicki was prescient in seeing modifications coming for the media business, telling Fortune’s Jennifer Reingold that the longer term would belong to particular person content material creators who had the ability to amass audiences on YouTube.
“They are their own media companies. They are the CEO, they are the personality, and then behind them as they get bigger they have production and editors and writers and so we really have this next generation of media companies,” she predicted.
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