Larry Page: He's focused! He's busy! He's in charge!
The New York Times catches up with Google's new CEO--sort of--and finds that, well, he's busy trying to streamline the company.
Google CEO Larry Page hates meetings, hates e-mail, likes bathroom breaks and wants the search giant to be a more focused, more agile and faster-moving company. And not everyone at Google is happy about it.
There, now you've just learned about everything you would have gleaned from the New York Times' just-published Google profile--one for which, notably, Page himself declined to be interviewed.
Page may have "geek street cred" with his employees, but his drive to streamline the search giant's sprawling business risks alienating many employees, the NYT's Claire Cain Miller found. "He's going to lose some people at the end of the day," one Google employee, who asked to remain anonymous, told the paper.
Here are some other tidbits you might otherwise miss:
- Since Page took the reins at Google in April, he has eliminated over 25 projects, including its Buzz social network, claiming they weren't popular enough to justify keeping them. Fellow Google co-founder Sergey Brin said that his company doesn't "want to be left with a complicated array of good-but-not-great services."
- While Page has discouraged too much e-mail use because it slows people down, he has pushed hard for faster decision-making. One former Google executive told the NYT that compared to Google's earlier Schmidt-Page-Brin triumvirate, Page is "much more willing to make an O.K. decision and make it now, rather than a perfect decision later."
- Page, who once dropped his secretary because she scheduled him for too many meetings, recently broke down and hired a personal assistant. But meetings now are only 50 minutes long, because Page decreed that there must be time for bathroom breaks between them.
- At a recent conference, Page named the biggest threat to his company: "Google."