In an announcement that might inspire you to reevaluate your own approach to things, Larry Page, Google CEO, announced Monday that there were some changes going on around here.
In a letter on behalf of himself and Sergey Brin, his fellow Google cofounder, Page explained the major overhaul of the status quo at Google citing the primary reason as tendency toward complacency when companies get too comfortable doing the same thing and making tweaks here and there.
“But in the technology industry, where revolutionary ideas drive the next big growth areas, you need to be a bit uncomfortable to stay relevant,” Page wrote in a letter explaining the move.
He said that even though Google was operating just fine that he and his team believe they “can make it cleaner and more accountable.”
So, they’re creating a new company called Alphabet (http://abc.xyz).
Page will be Alphabet’s CEO, and Brin will be president.
He went on to explain that Alphabet is mostly a collection of companies — with Google, of course, being the largest.
“Fundamentally, we believe this allows us more management scale, as we can run things independently that aren’t very related. Alphabet is about businesses prospering through strong leaders and independence. In general, our model is to have a strong CEO who runs each business, with Sergey and me in service to them as needed,” Page wrote. “We will rigorously handle capital allocation and work to make sure each business is executing well. We’ll also make sure we have a great CEO for each business, and we’ll determine their compensation. In addition, with this new structure we plan to implement segment reporting for our Q4 results, where Google financials will be provided separately than those for the rest of Alphabet businesses as a whole.”
If you’re wondering, Page said that Alphabet Inc. will replace Google Inc. as the publicly-traded entity and all shares of Google will automatically convert into the same number of shares of Alphabet, with all of the same rights.
So, there you go. Won’t you sing along with me?