Is Google A Leader?
That’s the question John asks in his recent post but I think he is straying of the path a little bit in the process. He mentions, and rightly so, that all the armchair CEOs out there always know best what Google should do and say so. Sadly they don’t know a lot about what happens in Google itself and they always have vastly different opinions among themselves. So you can’t really please them. John also believes that we really long for a clear vision from a leader and that might be partly true.
To quote an old summary from a course, in the end, leadership is about acceptable influence and effective persuasion. It depends on knowledge and expertise and on developing interpersonal relationships based on mutual trust and understanding.
What John is talking about is in large part the understanding part. We don’t really know where Google is going and as a group we need both that and a sense of why getting there is so damn important.
The other very important part that is probably bugging a lot more people at this time is the mutual trust or just trust in general. We have stopped trusting Google to do good… oh yeah right, they only said that they don’t do bad (which is amazingly different from doing good), so that is alright. The thing is that they are starting to do too much stuff that is not really nice in terms of privacy issues. It’s no wonder they pulled the accelerator again. Nobody believed their idea of doing it to allow people to save time … I think 7.5 minutes was in their image on the homepage. Who the hell cares. We are surfing fast enough, and really not accidently prefetching some illegal porn pictures.
They are extending AdSense and AdWords to allow for big sized Flash banners. How come they don’t run on Google itself though? Oh yeah, they’re annoying.
Some things they do just seem to be ungood, not bad, but not really doing something good either. And at the same time they are making billions. We just don’t get it. The trust is starting to creep away.
And one thing. If they are planning anything like a WebOS, then I’d pretty swiftly start talking to people about privacy issues and why you are so damn trustable because it’s a very important issue for the thing Google does.