. 2022-3 welcomes you to 15th annual players cards of world record jobs - how to play games version of WRJ
Health we continue to value alumni of Brilliant, Nightingale (doubly so given Ukraine situation) , the women who built a nation round last mile health care with Fazle Abed.,Abed's 21st C comrade spirit Jim Kim without whom the signature transformation of UN leader Guterres : UN2 that proacts engineering/entrepreneur/education/Servant leader smarts into any silo of old gov probably would not be with us
WorldClassDaos recommends we leap into better 2020s best place to start: HONG KONG as WorldClassEngineer laureate of 2022. While dad, norman macrae, coined term Entrepreneurial Revolution in The Economist 1969. Friends think there would be few problems in the world if every 1/1000 of humans were as energetic multi-win traders as Hong Kong, Hong Kong is leading 21st coming of age with unprecedented co-creativity geared to making sure web3 serves communities in ways no previous web 2, 1 or tele media (arguably only attenborough beat off vested interests to sustain 50 years of consistent tv storytelling access -moreover web3 has emerged out of a radical fintech foundation with concept of Satoshi 2008 intended to be a decentralised solution to serial abuse of communities by subprime banking
JOTTINGS: Nightingales deliver motion for UNGA77 .why love Stanford. (rules options) ::
top 2 alumni networks to cooperate with remain Fazle Abed & Von Neumann-; with urgent appearance of web3 as make or break sustainability generation we've spent time zooming up bop-eg Singapore Players, ..... more WRJ
Upd Fall 2023 - Worlds AI see change everyone's futures; Musk headline on need for 3rd party referee is transnational ai summit's deepest intelligent momentupd valentines 2023 ...Join us at twitterversal.com and TAO: Twitter Autonomy Opsworldclassdaosgreenbigbang invites you to have a sneak at our new picks for 2023 if you are comfy with messy searchesSDGs rising by valuing women's productivity emulating mens
Coming soon Tao.dance- dance then wherever you may be for I am the oak tree of nature's dance said (s)he
If you are going to help save 2020s world from extinction (let alone putin!) the top 50 people you'll need to learn and action with will be a deeply personal combo- GAMES OF WRJ #1 edit 50 playing cards from WRJ -ask a friend to do likewise- see how many common choices you made -then choose one to keep your friend had not chosen and voce versa - by all means add in your own selections- keep updating your 50 cards aide memoire.. bon courage - who need to be at WRJ? rsvp chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk..*
9/8/18 paul oyer: fei-fei li : lei zhang - WE WELCOME q&a THE MORE MATHEMATUCAL OR HUMAN THE BETTER chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk MA stats cambridge 1973

2016 bangladesh schools go edigital nationwide :: brookings video :: Bangla video :: brac how's that
1/1/21 we have entered the most exciting decade to be alive- by 2030 we will likely know whether humans & tech wizards can save futureoflife- tech surveys indicate odds of accomplishing this greatest human mission would be lot less without spirit of a chinese american lady at stanford-...
bonus challenge for those on road to glasgow cop2 nov2021: future 8 billion peoples want to value from 2021 rsvp chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk

GAMES of world record jobs involve
*pack of cards: world record jobs creators eg fei-fe li ; fazle abed ...
*six future histories before 2021 starts the decade of empowering youth to be the first sustainable generation.

problem 99% of what people value connecting or doing to each other
has changed (and accelerated in last three quarters of a century- while laws, culture and nature's diversity and health are rooted in real-world foundations that took mother earth 1945 years to build with -and that's only using the christian calendar

1995 started our most recent quater of a century with 2 people in Seattle determined to change distribution of consumers' markets - the ideas of how of bezos and jack ma on what this would involve were completely different except that they changed the purpose of being online from education knowledge to buying & selling things -
nb consuming up things is typically a zero-sum game or less if done unsustainable- whereas life-shaping knowhow multiplies value in use
from 1970 to 1995 knowhow needed to end subsistence poverty of over a billion asian villagers was networked person to person by women with no access to electricity grids- their number 1 wrjc involved partnerships linked by fazle abed - borlaug's crop science was one of the big 5 action learnings -its person to person application saved a billion people from starvation; the first 185 years of the machie age started up bl glasgow university's smith an watt in 1760 had brought humans to the 2 world wars; when people from nearly 200 nations founded the united nations at san francisco opera house 1945 chances of species survival looked poor- miraculous;y one mathematician changed that before he died 12 years later- john von neumann's legacy was both the moon race and twin artificial intel labs - one facing pacific ocean out of stanford; the other facing the atlantic out of mit boston .. who are top job creating economists by practice - health -refugee sports green hong kong..where are top tour guides around billionaire 1 2 around poverty,,, we the peoples ...

Sunday, September 1, 2019

playing card pack2019 worldrecordjobs.com

JFKennedy: In 1961 a US president could assign 10000 young brains one great goal (moon race) to advance nations and inspire the world. By 21st C any new president began with legacy of 500000 pen pushers and 2 bipolar parties stuck in past arguments instead of leveraging next giant leaps for humanity. What might have happened if US hadn’t lost confidence in cultural integration, with JFK the first of many leadership assassinations 1963 & English language media turning virally pessimistic 24/7/365/60 ?

Valuing Commons not Socialism: Before world war 2 the BBC started the most innovative media experiment. What if the constitution of world service media wasn’t a corporation nor a .gov but owned by and for all peoples. While licence fee investment structure perpetuated, government control of secrets needed in war time has subsequently prevented much of BBC’s potential. David Attenborough is an exception -from the earliest days of tv show he has celebrated nature with a human joy  His more famous brother Richard went from acting to directing Gandhi the movie and bridging out of London Gandhian networks founded during Gandhi’s last 2000 person summit out of London, Quaker Friends House Easton 1925
1965: Intel’s Gordon Moore  alumni to multiply analytic and communications capacity of silicon chips 100 fold every decade to 2030. Human Race to Imagineer inter-networking with trillion times moore tech than moon landing. How would decades 5G (2020s) 4G 3G 2G 1G 0G(1970s) spin? Could 200 nations road map each decade of rising exponentials ahead of time? Futurise history -replace slavery’s half millennium of inequalities and gun-wars with love & action millennial SDGs so each next girl/boy born to thrive through livelihoods & community

Von Neumann: world wars accelerated engineering technologies: coding, telecoms, transport, nuclear. In 10 hectic years before death by cancer, JVN tided these up for US leap far ahead on nuclear; all other tech from computing to new brain science open sourced globally. Thus immigrant from Europe’s East hyperlinked flows of positive productivity: human & machine intel. He’ be shocked Nasa missed human interest story of moon landing 1969: Look at mother earth: 10% people continent America so lucky lots of land & ocean; due to how Britannia colonized birders 50% people continental Asians so little equality of ocean access; remap world trade out of aisingapore.org so millennials first sustainability generation. So much work to do 1955-2025report.net
 Through Q3 of 20th C, Borlaug grew one of 2 memes whose grassroots networking by village women has saved over a billion people from starvation and dehydration. His crop science raised productivity and food security of village communities. With south Asia’s staple, rice, it is as vital a primary literacy as numbers. Life critical community knowhow is borderless- local rice science innovation  energetically shared by Chinese and Bangladeshi matriarchs since 1970s raising life expectancy
Q3 20th C: American  Deming improves engineering productivity by order of magnitude. Ironically US’s big engineering companies wouldn’t hire him. Deming networks became how japan and  far east re-engineered worldwide supply chains maximizing JIT & SME & next gen infrastructure maps. Core to new capitalism: sustain positive flows: heartland and coastal supercities- by 1962 japan risen 2nd largest economy, by 1975 first 10 years of Singapore transformed far east seas: world trade’s leading space
1964 Detroit, Larry Brilliant’s career starts: first job as doctor to care for Warner Brother’s pop band Wavy Gravy on global tour. After hard year’s work, band relaxes: visiting consciousness guru in Afghan hills. Even remote villagers saw moon race beginning era of no mission impossible. Larry stayed in A. Asia: the man to end smallpox, and …since 1960s The Economist argues local celebration universal health care = core audit designing youth’s global sustainability
1968 Yoko Ono Japanese American multimedia Artist rose from birth to aristocratic family Tokyo 1933 to marrying Beatle John Lennon NY 1969. Wedding song Imagine forwarded united world of peoples beyond old nations. While John killed 1980, Yoko’s vision cheers on artistic supercities and www networkers of love and human capital

America’s most undervalued pop star the Grateful Dead’s J Perry Barlow who wend from leading the band to EFF : Tim Berner Lee’s west coast partner
The second bottom-up knowhow meme for saving a billion lives: Oral Rehydration (OR) discovered in a Calcutta lab. Not until former shell CEO Fazle Abed changed career 1972 to poverty alleviation and developing poorest Muslim women villagers webs can build nations that OR became core primary school curriculum and with crop science catalyst to banking for village family businesses.  During 1970s Fazle started up BRAC Bangladesh Rural Advancement  Committee with head office in village so that BRAC became the first Freire-audited, & now world #1 livelihood edu system, and NGO partnership
Missing Lesson: Back in 1930s when Montessori helped Gandhi design peer to peer village schools, OR unknown
The moon race catalyzed a continent-wide debate across Latin America. What had this region inherited culturally from the Spanish and Portuguese. Brazilian Paulo Freire pedagogy of oppressed chartered the vision of community experiential learning mediated by Franciscan servant leaders. It wasn’t until late 1980s that Boston health students started scaling this with services in Haiti and Peru but as we see from Fazle Abed, Bangladesh Muslim village women empowerment started putting Freire into motion from 1972 onwards. POP took on new meaning of Preferential Opportunity Poor- nations great leaders live , learn with poorest -link in new tech
1964: Out of British Embassy in Tokyo Prince Charles enjoys watching the Olympics on the best tv set he had ever seen. He asks the engineer installing it , Akio Morita, to inward invest in the UK- the first small but hi-visibility step in transformation between Japan and European investments in mutual human productivity and trust-flows
Kissinger’s US diplomacy through 1970s mediated ultimate 21stc miracle- what was the right time for fifth of worlds people to rejoin world markets- china had withdrawn in 1860 rather than accept British ultimatum of opium as trading currency
1946 Japan Emperor Family: Japanese Emperor Hirohito changed Far East’s most aggressive colonist by declaring to his peoples his greatest error. I was wrong in thinking Japanese engineers would be good at war-let’s find every world class value of engineering Far East islanders can share and map happy world trading routes around. From 1962, Economist surveys “Consider Japan” as leading rising sun nations as smart superports. Ref Japan Keiretsu, Korea Chaebol

1976 China’s Deng Xiaoping experiments 5 capitalisms in one: diaspora inward investment, Keynesian agriculture, ..asks japan redesign Beijing’s engineering Uni- scary old communism replaced by human cap: grandmothers & 1-child family tree
Fazle Abed Bangladesh BRAC.net through 0G-5G decades; starts up community resilience hubs chaired by village girls changed the global aid industry; however how to mobilise this through 2G 1990s to 5G 2020s depended on partnership sequencing. Those who kept joining Fazle Abed’s mission just in time have achieved ultra SDgoal miracles eg digital bank-a-billion bkash.com. Back in Marco Polo’s day St Francis demonstrated nature as men’s prime network and local health : the Clares’ network
Which nations’ schools dared explore how 1980s changed language literacy for ever. Coding became as valuable as mother tongue
Bill Gates PCLanguage 1 extended S valley to Seattle
Jobs Apple Mac Valley  PCL2
Torvalds from Nordica to S Valley: PCL3: open source Linux
 Just as coding was the lost curriculum of 20th C, The Lancet has published chapter & verse : missing in 2010s is peer to peer pre-adolescent health
1975 Hangzhou: Jack Ma Part 1- seeing 10 year old Ma bored in classrooms, his Geography teacher said our designated tourist town Hangzhou has no real maps of outside world. Why don’t you train 1000 youth to speak English. be joyful tourist guide, explore their global stories. Jack Ma took education outside classroom age 11-30. Today, different regions in China are designing practical non-examination schooling –eg Girls AI
1985 China: personal telephones non-existent. Jack Ma 2 hears  rumor that Ren Zengfei (Huawei birth 1985) is helping rural communities leapfrog to 21st C telecoms.By1995, his first trip  USA he sees worldwide web and Bezos launch Amazon. He asks the greatest job creating question of changing millennium – when www comes to china how can youth maximise jobs & integrates SMEs into every markets value chain. Jack starts 25 years youth ambassador ecommerce/ fintech
Berners Lee invents worldwide web and transfers from Geneva to MIT Boston. Life’s mission, as seen London Olympics www is for everyone. Co-star opening acts_ Queen Elizabeth & J Bond parachute in
Over 20 us companies cooperate a million dollars each in intergenerational research launch MIT media lab :– first global hub questioning how digital changes architectures wherever people mobilise apps, rebuild infrastructure
Negropronte MIT Media Lab founder, just as Gates later rued missing main language of smart mobiles, Negropronte edutech too early with PCs. But positive uses of co-workers wiki tech emerge including Jimmy Wales wikipedia
MIT Quadirs take mobile phones to village bangladesh – rural world first 1996 -china soon emukates in race to mobilese end of poverty. Quadirs first syndicate includes gift from Soros and tech transfer from Telenor and momentum of Grameen Dr Yunus




Happy 2020s Play GAMES WorldRecordJobs.com (search creator names) – fantasy game 1: pack of 52 playing cards  - transfer list Q&A chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk
Bloomberg NY
Of 10 smartest supercities (population over 15 million), helping all citizens value new tech, USA has one in top 10. New York. gravitated by Bloomberg’s finance (world’s wealthiest top 10), media and social goals, NY 2010s on a roll with early childhood edu, return to nearly free CUNY uni system, Bloomberg conscience: healthy societies generates strong economies. Over 3 billion dollars donated to NY-Baltimore Bloomberg John Hopkins bodes well for AI Health.  US time-warped infrastructure stunted other US cities– let’s see American youth/teachers benchmark smarts of NY, ignore DC’s divisive lobbies. World’s biggest city Shanghai’s Bloomberg?-  Fosun 5 : Guo G, Liang X, Wang Q, Fan W and tech wizard Tan J
Masa Son Tokyo
1981: Masa Son started softbank out of Tokyo just as Japan began its first of five ten year AI plans 1G to 5G. As the 4G decade of 2010s hands over to SDG’s ultimate decade of AI 5G IOT and 7 other top 10 ways to innovate humanity, Masa Son has formed the deepest AI partnership funds- they linkin from US West coast to Taiwan to Japan to China mainland to UK and Saudi and anywhere human AIdemocracy.com could yet rise and shine. An open secret: use supercity hubs as #digitalcooperation labs -check out sharing economy models such as wework – cloud up big data that can empower a giant leap from one to many urgently needy societies in a world where the Artificials are borderless in their statistical superpowers even if the humans are still bordered by 200 different cultural stories of our race’s past glory. Quite simply if AI does not help fintech and edutech value children as every place’s win-win currency, Robots will take over the world and mother earth will have a breakdown. 2020s are most exciting time to be alive if transparency of 2020s AI funds is celebrated . As London Olympics asked: does the global business language of English need a James Bond and Queen Elizabeth to beam down to help identify who’s hubbing loveq? AI- dare we overcome the spectre of dismal haters of hard working families ? Can we ground growth of communities by and for all? Related share girls supercities social economics of Musicforsdgs.com Techforsdgs.com
Guterres NY -of 100 moving parts inside the UN which is most important? Its worth exploring 2 opposite kind of answers that Guterres life has prepped him for. 1. Emergencies the world asks UN to resolve- eg flying in food where million are starving; squatting on borders with refugees until place leaders rediscover faith hope and love. 2 Innovation hubs that educators and youth can map the 5G Ai trillion times moore 2020s with. Starting 2016 UN appointed Jack Ma as youth livelihoods ambassador. Guterres also knows how to culturally translate golden rule religions and places prioritizing spiritual self-determination
Jack Ma 3 from student year 2019 j ma returns to his first career teaching but with 25 years more tech tools and links to the world’s biggest digital payment system and AI explores (eg DAMO www.alibabauni.com) than when he trained 1000 youth person to person to learn English becoming tour guides of china and Silk Road’s world favorite tourist destination Hangzhou. No market is immune from needing to sustain small enterprises – now jack’s reached every market he can with commerce – he’s looking for service celebration platforms include 5 supercities Olympics and green superplace connectors who value their youth as win-win currency

Kishore Mahbubani, Singapore served Lee Kuan Yew. LKY was greatest 20th leader of 6 million person network (Singapore’s birth new nation 1965). Greatness as Singapore defines it is win-win trade with 360 degree diversity that people and places can develop with each other. Anything you don’t know you don’t know about North-East-West-South is worth checking out with KM scholars. He celebrates experiential learning and translations of two of globalisation’s most positive jobs - building Singapore’s National University, as UN Ambassador watching how 200 nations leaders interacted over decades. Read KM’s books on how Singapore has celebrated diversity with all its Asean neighbors, and become the smartest isle on the planet see edu-hub AIsingapore.org
 Bezos Seattle Founded ecommerce 1995.- In 2018 Amazon surveyed 202 US cities for 2020s human AI fitness. 200 failed. One succeeded but the suburb that most needed Amazon didn’t get it. One American capital was causing so much distress for the world that Bezos decided to set up HQ2 as close to its DC border as practical. Alumni of Case’s AOL 1985 including  1776 hubs have “DCBA” dream DC-Baltimore-Amazon- an alternative AI democracy play to google’s alphabet
Schwarzman NY- ex ceo Schmidt of alphabet declared June 2019 that the smartest giving billionaires would do a Schwartzman. So far Schwartzman has planted 3 East-North university colleges : 2  engineering (Tsinghua-MIT) one moral sentiments  (Oxford). Map how to fast forward future of AI research to world’s most curious and loving under 30s not bureaucrats who’d trap them in debt nor
Schwab Geneva
Hosting world economic fora in breaks between skiing was bit cheeky in mid 1960s when father Norman Macrae loved Schwab’s dialogues as antidote to EU bureaucracy. Today as well as China and Davos annual world economic forums, Schwab links 3 additional IR4 supercity hubs – Beijing Tokyo San Fran and 300+ youth global shapers hubs. IF Geneva puts Europe on AI 2020s maps – then thank KC
Pony Ma Founder Tencent- Shenzen regions ecosystem for internet startups. Originally a games web, Tencent invented 2010s favorite mobile chat-tool – called we chat, its been “copied” by whatsapp now a facebook company. Wechat pay extended into one of world’s top 2 digital payment system. Now facebook announces its desire to follow again with LIbra
1998 Serge Brin; Valley’s leading Russian American: from search to AI Alphabet by way of Android O/S: alumnisat.com mobile 4G  -open sourced by Linux Kernel
1999, Romano Prodi, Italian version Economist Entrepreneurial Revolution 1976, starts 5 years leading EU. Med sea integration exclude as Germany superpowers on with its integration
Ka-Shing HK- everyone who loves Hong Kong can thank this billionaire who wired it up before China realized that wireless is the way to empower half a billion Chinese youth dreams. Ka-shing portfolio of investment in newly open university partnerships links entrepreneurs across hemispheres
Kai-Fu Lee Cancer interrupted KFL as Alphabets AI cheerleader- after HK cure started hub at gateway of Tsinghua university- asked to help design AI avenue of entrepreneurs in every university town- his 4 favorite AI superpower compasses: internet platforms,  human body language, big companies with a future, supercity
Robin Li  In China, Baidu plays similar role to google-alphabet. Whilst its initial business model was search, like alphabet it becomes a magnet for digital futures projects. Baidu may we waiting for its big leap-rumor is its main smart tech designer for china’s biggest new town
WeWork hubs: 2005 UK was supposed to be Blair-Mandelas year of make poverty history- instead it became 7/7 nightmare. Friends started up the good hub guide- 15 years on: wework by Adam Neumann (hobby babel AI linguistics) is benchmark AI hub -watch which supercities’ linkin

AirBnb-  1984’s 2025report.net foresaw home swapping as vital to AI maps: eg sustainable tourism www family edu, diverse ecosystem- Brian Chesky’s alumni small step next airbnb designs houses!
Elon Musk the south African who learnt from space what nasa did not and united clean energy engineers in marathon struggles against short-term speculators

Jerry Yang 95’s launch of yahoo very pc centric- by 2001 yang foresaw clouds and mobiles- linked investors from silicon valley japan Taiwan HK and china- if the world is sustained by tech, JY will be one of the most modest but greatest 360 degree connectors
Jim Kim: WHO’s bottom-up health aka anthropologists change medical world when Harvard classrooms exchanged with partners in health practice Haiti & Peru, Scaling support- came from billionaire Soros who asked JK and Farmer serve dissident prisons in Russia to minimize TB there. PIH founded first last mile health teaching hospital in Africa in Rwanda- just in time to help Soros  and brac & last mile servants  in w africa end ebola
Xi Jinping -Lee Kuan Yew nominated XI as an oriental Mandela- capable of living all his peoples enough to survive many downs as well as ups – in the partners he helped youth scale- I recommend western aliens who want to give XI a hearing start with his 1988 book out of poverty- it explains a lot more than any presidential biography I have seen
Kalanick & Camp’s Uber ridesharing changed what citizens expect AI big transport o/s  origin 08 Paris leweb-see more infra treasure maps at bri.school . NB developing world, uber of motorcycles is kickstarter to smart capital citizenry
Japan’s Reiwa’s first year relaunches human AI. Abe Soc5.0 lot of connecting as do #metoo  fashion Japan and Latin billionaires CEOs @ Uniqlo & Zara
Nilekani , Kalam, Modi. Nilekani, India’s greatest job creating technologist, world leader in tele centers spent a decade designing the most exciting big data- over a billion people’s digital ID. This was a shared vision of youth champions late great Kalam –  incubating entrepreneurship inside gov : India’s Space networks. Today Kishore values Modi next steps.
Kagame: when china hosted g20 2016  jack ma spent a year to sherpa tech world citizens including women, youth and fintech. EWTP: He promised to give his knowledge on sme commerce & digital pay to first African nation sure they wanted him . Kagame stepped up as he had done with jim kim an farmer’s first Africa teaching hospital
Kishore believes LKY would vote for Widodo as Asean reality leader. When a mayor of a city as huge as Jakarta become president chances of sustainable human flows rise. More: See last world bank annual meet of jim kim -eg panel with Jack Ma and Nilekani and chief listener Widodo


eric schmidt (ex google chair) interview with hoffman
https://mastersofscale.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/mos-episode-transcript_-eric-schmidt.pdf
Masters of Scale Episode Transcript: Eric Schmidt ERIC SCHMIDT: My first office at Google was an 8-by-12 office, just enough room for me and my desk and my little chair. And one day I walked in, and I find I have a roommate. I said “Hello.” He says, “Hello.” I said, “Hi, I'm Eric.” And he goes, “Hi, I'm Amit.” REID HOFFMAN: That’s Eric Schmidt. This story happened on his first day as Google’s CEO in 2001. SCHMIDT: Now as a new person coming into the company, it’s very important to not create a cultural faux pas. Like it would be incorrect to say, “I'm the CEO. Get the heck out of my office.” So I looked at my secretary and said, “Did you know anything about this?” And she said “no.” And I said, “Well, who said you could move in?” And he said, “The VP of engineering.” And I said, “Ah, they playing a joke on me.” And I said, “Well, why did you move here?” “Well, because I was in a six person office, it was very crowded, and your office was empty.” So we became colleagues. HOFFMAN: So was Amit playing a joke on Eric? Oddly enough, Eric doesn’t say. He drops the investigation. Amit offers no further explanation. They settle into their work, and do a fine job of ignoring one another. SCHMIDT: He would put his headphones on and I would talk on the phone. I’m calling the vice president of sales. And at the time the revenue was estimated about 120. And I said, “Don't you think you could do better?” And he said, “Well, I think we can get to 123, 124.” “Come on push harder, push harder.” And as I hang up the phone, Amit takes his headphones off and said, “I can tell you what the revenue is going to be.” And I said, “I knew you were listening into my conversations.” And so I said, “What's the revenue going to be?” And he said, “It’s going to be 138.” I said, “How do you know that?” “Because I build the analytics that predict this.” And so I didn't tell the sales people, and I watched—and they kept moving their forecast up, and hit 138. It was a really easy lesson to understand the power of data analytics, plus having a great roommate. HOFFMAN: Amit eventually built a tool that accurately predicts how much revenue the company had at any given time, down to the second. Pranks and productivity tend to blend together at Google, which is why Eric doesn’t dwell on the question of why Amit moved in to begin with. SCHMIDT: We were roommates and literally officemates for years. We became such good friends. HOFFMAN: I would argue that a dash of insubordination is the secret ingredient to Google’s success. Ideas emerge organically through conversations like the one Eric and Amit had in their cramped executive suite. There’s only one way to keep those unruly conversations going. You let them unfold chaotically, anywhere and everywhere across the organization. And you listen for what bubbles up. If you want your company to innovate, your job is to manage the chaos. [THEME MUSIC] HOFFMAN: This is Masters of Scale. I’m Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, partner at Greylock and your host. In this episode, I’m going to make the case that the best managers—of the most innovative organizations—don’t tell their employees how to innovate. They manage the chaos. I’ll prove that to you with stories from the smartest entrepreneurs I know. If you want an innovative company, your job is to manage the chaos. Managing chaos may sound like a contradiction in terms. Shouldn’t it be the opposite? Isn’t the manager’s job to wring order out of chaos? Not always. If you want to invent something new, or reinvent something at a spectacular order of magnitude, you have to suppress management. Let your employees pursue wild ideas that may raise your eyebrows. It’s not for you to judge whether their ideas are good or bad. It’s for your employees to prove it through freewheeling experimentation. I wanted to talk to Eric Schmidt about this, because he pushes the anti-management philosophy to its outer limits—as CEO of Google, and now as chairman of the parent company, Alphabet. He’s an unlikely proponent of chaos, because he came to Google from a company that nearly crashed due to lax management. Before Google, he was CEO of the software company Novell. We’ll start the story on his first day at Novell, when he discovered the company’s financials weren’t all they were cracked up to be. SCHMIDT: The reality, of course, hit on the first day, because I was presented with different numbers for revenue for the quarter than I'd been told when I was interviewing. And by that Wednesday, third day in the job, we were in a real crisis. We had a month which we called the worst month, where everything was failing, and it was clear that the business was in very different trouble. And there was a moment in that month where I remember saying to my colleague, “I just want to get out of here with my integrity intact.” HOFFMAN: There’s only one way to take your mind off of a disaster on this scale—flirt with scarier disasters. SCHMIDT: My friend said, “You need a distraction. And if you're flying planes, you won't be able to think of anything else.” It was the best advice ever. I eventually figured out it made a big difference, shockingly to me—because in aviation, they teach you to make rapid decisions, and they, over and over again: “Decide, decide, decide.” It's better to make a decision and just accept the consequences. And that discipline helped me in the hard times when I was at Novell in a real hard core turnaround. So I approached aviation the same way I approached the company, which was trying to figure out how it actually worked. And once you figured it out, if it's a well-defined system, it has a certain logic and a certain beauty in it. HOFFMAN: I want you to notice two things in this story. The first is the way Eric thinks about companies: SCHMIDT: If it's a well-defined system, it has a certain logic and a certain beauty in it. HOFFMAN: He’s thinks of a company as a system that he has to understand. The other thing I want you to notice is what flying taught him about decision-making: SCHMIDT: In aviation, they teach you to make rapid decisions, and they, over and over again: “Decide, decide, decide.” It's better to make a decision and just accept the consequences. HOFFMAN: Both of these habits will serve Eric well as he lands in Google’s chaotic system. And he’s about to land. That opportunity came in the form of a fateful phone call. SCHMIDT: I got a call from John Doerr, a good friend and venture capitalist, who said, “You should come over and talk to Google.” And I said, “Oh, it’s just a search engine.” He said, “Well, you'll enjoy it.” And I said, “Probably not.” But I figured I'd go visit, because I'm curious. And I walked in, and here's Larry and Sergey— VOICE: Larry Page and Sergey Brin are the two founders of Google. SCHMIDT: —Two young men. They had my bio all on the wall, and they had food on the table in front of them. I thought, “This is very odd.” And they proceeded to spend an hour and a half grilling me about what I was doing at Novell, and deciding that it was foolish—that the products we were building made no sense. And I, of course, provided a blistering counterattack. And as I left that day, I realized that I hadn't had such a good conversation in years. And that was the moment I knew this was a special company. HOFFMAN: You might find it odd to hear a “blistering counterattack” described as a “good conversation.” But I’m not surprised by Eric’s reaction here. He knew how rare it was, as an executive, to find a team that’s willing to challenge you. And this feisty, free-thinking team just might push him to top of his talent. Not every CEO is cut out for this kind of insubordination. But the most innovative ones welcome it. I asked Margaret Heffernan to give us a perspective on this. Margaret was the CEO of five tech companies, and she gave a TED Talk called “Dare to Disagree.” So I thought she might have an opinion on Eric’s reaction. MARGARET HEFFERNAN: Any CEO worth their salt is starved for argument and debate, so I’m not incredibly surprised by Schmidt’s response—because one of the big problems with power is that most people won’t argue with you if you’re in a powerful position. They mostly try to second guess you. They try to figure out, “What is it you want me to say?” And of course that’s no use at all, because being told what you think you want to hear doesn’t give you any options. You’re kind of stuck in your own head. HOFFMAN: You have to be able to butt heads. But there’s an art to disagreeing well. High-speed, high-IQ conversations often have the rhythm of “point / counterpoint.” That’s how you move across the intellectual space quickly—I say something, and you say, “Well, actually, this part of what you're saying isn't quite right. Here's the better version.” Some people naturally excel at this kind of conversation. For others, it takes practice. Technical people, for example, usually need to learn that you don’t have to start the conversation with, “You’re wrong,” or, “That’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard.” Far better, you can say, “That's interesting. But here's a challenge to that point of view.” And if you do it that way, you frequently make more progress, because then people are less hung up on whether “I’m right,” or whether “I’m wrong,” and stay focused on the idea. As Eric ventured outside the executive suite, he found idea-generating conversations unfolding across the company. SCHMIDT: I think a fair statement is that the founders built the company in the image of what they saw at Stanford graduate school. So the offices for example, if you had them, would have four people in them—which is the number of graduate students that are in an office. And of course, everyone's very crowded, and it's very casual. And of course there's free food, and everyone is sort of hanging out all day. And that graduate student culture—that sense that somehow we're about to discover something new—permeated the decision making. So the culture of food and benefits and being quirky came from the founders trying to recreate that feeling. HOFFMAN: Amid this creative ferment, his job was simple. He just had to give employees a slight nudge to deliver on their promising ideas. SCHMIDT: The first thing I did as I went to the staff meeting. And the staff meetings were long, and they were like being in graduate school. “What do you think of this? What do you think of that?” But a real lack of business procedures, and that kind of thing, which were easily remedied. HOFFMAN: When you’re surrounded by bright young minds, you don’t have to push too hard for interesting ideas. They tend to tumble out of conversations or shared challenges, and take you in unpredictable directions. But not every manager is comfortable with this type of chaos. It requires a particular kind of leader who can embrace both humility—the uncomfortable notion that you don’t have all of the best ideas yourself—and uncertainty—because you can’t always schedule innovation on a predictable timeline. I’m going to come right out and say it: If you’re a control freak, you’re going to have a hard time with this. And if you find yourself relating to this song—it’s Jamie Leonhart, by the way—you’re probably at least part control freak. And the hardest part for control freaks is when your team suggests an idea that you find utterly reckless. And that’s exactly what Eric thought when his team suggested a radical new way to set prices on advertisements. What I’m about to describe may sound crazy to you—and it sounded that way to Eric, too. Eric’s team made an argument for a type of auction, in which bidders name their price, without seeing competing offers. The highest bidder wins, but only has to pay the second highest bid. This is effective because it allows bidders to go high, knowing they will only pay true market value. And there are plenty of academic papers explaining why this type of auction would actually work wonders on revenue. But companies rarely put it into practice. SCHMIDT: I was absolutely convinced that this would bankrupt the company. And I was so convinced, that I ordered a cash-restriction period, where the only thing that you could do was spend money on Friday mornings, at 10:00. You had to come to my office and you had to convince me that you needed to buy those pencils, or those computers, or whatever. HOFFMAN: You heard that right. Not only was he convinced it was a bad idea. He was convinced that it would bankrupt the company. So he forced all purchases to be brought to his office in person. SCHMIDT: And as we pushed this thing through, we turned it on, but we had no data analytics, because no one had bothered to get that working yet. And we went into full crisis mode for a week, meeting every day at 4:00 to try to figure out what to do. At the end of the week, we realized we were making far more money, and we were able to go from there. It was that moment that I realized that both this team was magical, but also that the scale of the search ads opportunity was immensely larger than even we had thought. HOFFMAN: Notice how Eric is stunned by the success that emerged out of this chaos—he calls it “magical.” And to harness this magic in an organization, you have to understand where ideas come from—not just from individuals, but from networks of people. And this runs contrary to the popular myth about innovation. We tend to tell the heroic story of innovation. This is a story that credits a single inventor: the founder, the creator. A genius has an idea. Everyone else executes on the idea. And then everyone waits for the genius to have another idea. But that’s a false story of innovation, and it breaks in at least two ways. First, while it’s true that some people are much better at idea generation than others, it’s always better to have a number of people working on ideas simultaneously. The best idea may come from person #89. And you can’t always predict where the good ideas will come from. And second, very rarely do ideas spring perfectly formed, like Athena from the brow of Zeus. To turn a good instinct into a good idea, you have to talk to a lot of smart people, and ask them for feedback and criticism. So having networks both within and outside the company to improve on ideas is key to success. Margaret Heffernan, former CEO of five tech companies and advocate of frank conversations, has a great example of a time this worked. I asked her to tell the story. HEFFERNAN: The piece of software we were running had a very specific problem, which was what I would call a load balancing problem. It would just require too much processing power. And the more customers we got, the more acute this problem became. And because it’s such an existential threat, everybody knows about it. And one Friday, one of my marketing people came to me and said, “You know, I’m not an engineer, but I just had this idea.” So I call my CTO and I say, “Harry, what do you think about this?” And he thinks about it for a minute, and he thinks, “I think I know how we could do that.” So it was a really thrilling, not to mention kind of life-saving moment. But what I think is especially interesting is, in very siloed organizations, or fearful organizations, you wouldn’t share that problem. But actually, everyone knowing the problem was what allowed us to solve it. HOFFMAN: Margaret is right. No one in your organization has a monopoly on good ideas, particularly when you’ve hired thousands of smart creatives. What’s equally important to recognize, as an leader, is that you, personally, are not the source of all good ideas. My friend Mark Pincus learned this the hard way. He’s Co-Founder of the gaming company Zynga, which pioneered the idea of blending games into social media. Before Zynga, he built one of the first social networks, a little-known website called Tribe that didn’t quite make it. I asked him to tell me that story. MARK PINCUS: It's pretty amazing, if you think about it, that I started one of the first three social networks in 2003, and I managed to fail—at a time when everything worked, I actually managed to fail. And the lesson from Tribe that came resoundingly out for me—and still stands out—is that as entrepreneurs, part of the journey that we're on is learning how to separate our winning instincts from our losing ideas. I think as a rule of thumb, if you're a good entrepreneur, you can assume that your instincts are right 95% percent of the time, and your ideas might be right 25% percent of the time. HOFFMAN: By the time Mark launched Zynga, he was acutely aware of the dangers of stubbornly sticking to his ideas. He started to draw the distinction between his usually-great instincts and his not-always-great ideas. PINCUS: I'll try anything, and I'll kill anything, and I'll kill it quickly. And I'm not going to let killing an idea kill a winning instinct. And so that was a really core idea that I'm still thinking about, and learning as an entrepreneur. And I can see it playing out so often in people's companies. HOFFMAN: Mark separates specific ideas—which must be killed when they don’t work—from underlying instincts. And this willingness to kill ideas is essential to making innovation work. A free-wheeling, idea-generating climate of open inquiry—like the one Schmidt cultivated at Google—has to be matched with disciplined decision-making in order to thrive. SCHMIDT: The most important thing to do is to have quick decisions—and you’ll make some mistakes, but you need decision-making. We ultimately adopted a model of a staff meeting on Monday, a business meeting on Wednesday, and a product meeting on Friday, and this was organized so that people could travel in the right ways. And the agenda was, everybody knew which meeting the decisions were made at—and so as long as you could wait a week, you knew you would get a hearing on your deal. I cannot tell you how many people have told me that at Google, decisions are made today quickly, in almost every case, even at our current scale. And that's a legacy of that decision. Most large corporations have too many lawyers, too many decision-makers, unclear owners, and things congeal—they occur very slowly. But some of the greatest things happen very quickly. We made the decision to purchase YouTube in about 10 days—incredibly historic decision—because we were ready, people were focused, we had a board meeting—we wanted to get it done. So I always tell people, somebody is running your company. What are they doing? Why don't they just make this decision? Even if it's the wrong decision, a quick decision is better in almost every case. HOFFMAN: This combination of inventive, bottom-up ideas and focused, top-down decision making has guided Google’s growth over the past 16 years. But the two forces don’t always live together comfortably. Eric took some radical steps to keep ideas flowing in the organization. This meant empowering engineers, and keeping management in check. For instance, product leaders can draw in as many engineers as they’d like on any given project, so long as they can convince engineers to join their team. I've talked to other managers at Google who are frustrated with this, because they argue: “We agree that my project is strategic. Why don't you just assign some engineers to me?” And the answer is, “No, no—you have to persuade the engineers that your project’s a good one to work on. And then, by the way, you can have all of the engineers that you can persuade to work on that project.” And that's central to Google’s culture for making progress. Eric took this idea one step further. He granted employees the freedom not only to choose their projects, but openly defy their managers along the way. Google famously instituted a rule that any employee could devote 20% percent of their work-week to any project they’d like. 20% percent time was, in some ways, a logical extension of Google’s graduate school culture. Managers, like research advisors, can set timetables and budgets for experimentation. But the staff, like the “students,” pick the research agenda. SCHMIDT: Many, many initiatives in the company have come out of 20% percent time ideas. Much of the mapping work, many of the search ideas, many of the advertising, many of now the AI work, have come from people working and practicing in new areas. HOFFMAN: As Eric says, many of the products people know best—Gmail, Google Maps, Google News, AdSense—grew out of ideas generated by employees, during this 20% percent time. But why, exactly, does it work? SCHMIDT: And while the rule says you can do anything you want to with your 20 percent time, these people are computer scientists and engineers, they’re not going to veer too far away from their core business—and that is the genius of 20% percent time. HOFFMAN: The tendency of high-performing employees to use their 20% percent time productively is the well-documented genius of the program. But there’s also a hidden genius of 20% percent time. It allows reasonable employees to defy unreasonable managers. And this institutionalized defiance can help balance the power, and keep high-performing employees engaged during challenging times. SCHMIDT: So the interesting thing about 20% percent time is although it's reported as, “You get to spend one day doing whatever you want,” what it really served as was a check and balance on the power of the engineering management over the subject. So if an employee is under pressure, the manager says, “You've got to work harder, you've got to give me everything you have.” That employee can legitimately look that boss in the eye, and say, “I'll give you 100 percent of my 80% percent time.” And that simple principle—which never really happens in practice, but it's understood—empowers the employee with both dignity, but also some choices. HOFFMAN: Was there anything that you regretted that came out of the 20% percent time? SCHMIDT: No, because 20% percent time was understood as likely to fail. Part of your compensation was your ability to try new ideas and fail. The value of that failure is incalculable, because you tried something, it didn't work—well, then you try something else, it doesn't work. Persistence doesn't mean marching on the same program, against the same hill, with the same sledgehammer, or whatever metaphor you want. Persistence means you keep trying, but you change your tactics. You modify your strategy, you think differently about how to solve the problem, and you don't give up. HOFFMAN: So step one of managing the chaotic process of invention is allowing ideas and conversations to flow freely in an organization. Step two is making quick decisions on what’s working, and what isn’t. But step three is even harder: deciding the precise moment you should scale that idea to the world. And this requires an explosive change of pace. As soon as Eric saw the potential of Google’s new advertising model—the one driven by auction pricing—he turned to his colleague Omid Kordestani and asked about global sales. Turns out, international sales were non-existent. Eric saw an opportunity—and he acted. SCHMIDT: And so I said, “Omid, go to Europe next week, and don't come back until you have a European office set up.” And he looked at me and he said, OMID KORDESTANI: “Really?” SCHMIDT: And I said, “Yes.” KORDESTANI: It was very clear to him that, “Look, we just need to fire on all cylinders.” HOFFMAN: Yup, that’s Omid Kordestani, who’s now executive chairman of Twitter. He told us what he was thinking at the time: KORDESTANI: I need to get on a plane, and go set up these offices, and interview people, and set up our operations. I’ll start with London. SCHMIDT: He left on a Sunday night from California to London. KORDESTANI: I literally started going to hotels, and setting up meetings in hotel rooms. And I tapped into my network a lot of times—sometimes I used recruiters—but it was initially literally sitting in hotel lobbies and interviewing candidates one after another. SCHMIDT: And by the end of that week, he had hired the head of our London operation, and had identified heads of our Paris and Hamburg operation. So, a very productive week. KORDESTANI: To me, it was exciting that we’re taking this company, and now giving it wings across the globe. SCHMIDT: Today, Europe is 50% or 60% percent of the profits of a hundred-billion-dollar corporation. Think about if we'd waited a year, how much smaller that number would be. So moving and establishing a global revenue source quickly is key. And in hindsight, I would do that over again, and I would have done it even faster. HOFFMAN: Knowing when to scale is perhaps the single most valuable decision a manager can make. And because Eric was practiced in making fast, informed decisions, he was ready when the time came. I want to offer a note of caution here. I would never advise an entrepreneur to blindly copy Google’s rules and announce to their teams, “Okay, you all get free meals, 20% percent time, and the freedom to camp out in the CEO’s office. Now: start innovating.” That’s not a recipe for managed chaos so much as plain old chaos. As Eric said, you have to see your organization as a complex system that operates by a logic and beauty of its own. You have to understand how your staff operates as a network. And you’ll never build this network simply by announcing playful rules. You have to first recruit the right people who tend to swap ideas and tackle challenges together. To effectively manage the chaos, you have to hire people who thrive under chaotic circumstances. Remember how most people feel about chaos: And here we come to another secret of Google’s success. They’ve managed to quadruple in size each year, while ensuring that every last hire was, in Schmidt’s terms, a “smart creative.” SCHMIDT: So the company was getting very large, very quickly. And I had suggested to Larry and Sergey that there was a problem with what I called “glue people.” And glue people are very nice people who sit between functions, and help either side, but don't themselves add a lot of value. And I thought, “These are nice people, but we don't really need them. We can have these groups talking directly.” And Larry looked at me and says, “We could solve this problem, if you would just review all the hiring.” And I said, “Larry, we can't look at all the hiring.” He said, “Sure we can.” So the company, of course, invented a number of hiring algorithms, which are used throughout the industry today. Many of them include pretty aggressive hiring interviews from peers, asking people to do work, and so forth. Ultimately, the judgment has a lot to do with whether the person is interesting or not. And so we would, for example, take a position that we want to hire rocket scientists, because rocket scientists are inherently interesting. And in sales, we love to hire Olympians. Or Super Bowl winners, or football players—because of the discipline that they had in their lives as young people—men and women—to get to that point indicated that an extra set of discipline. HOFFMAN: I want to acknowledge that most companies don’t have the option of hiring rocket scientists, Olympic athletes and Super Bowl winners. But Eric does have more pragmatic advice for companies that can’t set the bar at Himalayan heights. SCHMIDT: So today I would suggest that—and this has since been confirmed by many studies—that persistence is the single biggest predictor of future success. And so we would look for persistence. And the second thing was curiosity. What do you care about? The combination of persistence and curiosity is a very good predictor of employee success in a knowledge economy. HOFFMAN: Suppose you’ve copied Google’s entire system for innovation, end-to-end. You’ve hired smart creative types, cultivated a culture of experimentation, and set up a decision-making framework that enables you to scale the best ideas without delay. None of these steps, on their own, will unlock innovative ideas, unless people are also sharing information across the organization, from the C-suite to the frontlines. And this principle extends beyond the organization as well. Your users can surprise you as much as your staff. Eric shares a story that I think gets to the very heart of the innovative process. It starts with the release of Google Earth, and ends with a journey into the inner workings of a cow brain. Allow Eric to explain. SCHMIDT: The most interesting thing about cows is that they organize themselves north and south, and they do that north and south because of the magnetic resonance inside their cow brains. How was this discovered? Because of Google Maps. HOFFMAN: That’s because Google Maps offered researchers the first comprehensive view of cow herds across the world. They zoomed in on herd after herd, and observed the same curious formation—snouts and tails, aligned north to south. This observation sent researchers on a whole new path of inquiry. And who could have predicted that path? So the next time you try to control where inquisitive minds might go in your organization — ask yourself: Do you really know what they might discover? Are you really prepared for the “cow brain” scenario? If not, then prepare to be shocked. Eric expects it. SCHMIDT: Learning about human behavior, and how people actually live and work, is, I think, always a shock. Humans are much more varied than you and I think they are. And most people don't know it, or don't pay attention to it. HOFFMAN: I’m Reid Hoffman. Thank you for listening.

No comments:

Post a Comment