Google Wisdom

Over time I've learned, surprisingly, that it's tremendously hard to get teams to be super ambitious.  It turns out most people haven't been educated in this kind of moonshot thinking.  They tend to assume that things are impossible, rather than starting from real-world physics and figuring out what's actually possible.  It's why we've put so much energy into haring independent thinkers at Google, and setting big goals.  Because if you hire the right people and have big enough dreams, you'll usually get there.  And even if you fail, you'll probably learn something important. 


It's also true that many companies get comfortable doing what they have always done, with a few incremental changes.  This kind of instrumentalism leads to irrelevance over time, especially in technology, because change tends to be revolutionary not evolutionary.  So you need to force yourself to place big bets on the future.

Larry Page

Google Cofounder and CEO

from How Google Works

pages xiii-xiv