Marrisa Mayer has identified one of the key challenges for Google is around how the company can keep innovating. So far they’re tackling this by getting to failure fast with projects.
Speaking at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, the VP of Seach & User Experience at Google went on to explain how they fail fast:
If you assume that one in five things you do will turn out to be really successful, and maybe two of five will be moderately successful, and the other two will languish, you want to do a lot of things. It’s all about being agile. Most of the teams at Google are three to ten people. Five people launched Google News. About five people launched Google Toolbar. They operate like small companies inside the large company.
Marissa goes on to compare Google to a VC firm – namely, they take a portfolio approach, placing bets on a number of teams with the expectation that there will be a high failure rate.
Google is a lot like managing a VC firm, because you’re placing bets on different teams. Our organization mirrors the Internet. It looks more like a network than a hierarchy.
In my opinion…this is a very, very smart way of business building, in fact I like to call it yoicking it!
