Ten years ago, Susan Wojcicki used a historical example of catastrophic failure and a more recent example of resounding success to learn essential lessons in leadership.
The former YouTube CEO died Friday after two years of lung cancer. She was a Silicon Valley pioneer who spent more than two decades leading various divisions of Google and parent company Alphabet.
in Graduation Ceremony 2014 In her commencement address at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, where she earned her MBA in 1998, Wojcicki recounted the speech she gave at Anderson.
The speaker at the time was US Filter CEO Richard Hickman, Who died in 2020While she spoke about the Titanic and ten lessons learned from its infamous sinking in 1912, there was one lesson that stood out and continued to influence her throughout her career.
“We could be completely wrong,” Wojciechowski told the graduates.
She added that the Titanic had the latest technology at the time and was considered unsinkable, but arrogance caused the ship to collide with an iceberg and sink.
Fujisaki thought about this lesson while helping build Google and during the collapse of the dot-com bubble, when she often drove by empty buildings that had once been home to prominent internet companies.
“And I thought, I could be completely wrong,” she recalled. “It turns out that was true for Google as a small company, but it’s even more true for us now that we’re bigger. When big companies fall, they fall much harder. When you’re steering a big ship, it turns out it’s hard to see the icebergs. And when you do, it becomes much harder to turn the ship around to avoid those icebergs and get away from them.”
Referring to how the smartphone revolution has suddenly upended the internet landscape, Wojciechowski urged the audience to embrace change and turned to a management lesson from the 2013 Disney film Frozen.
She explained that one of the main factors behind the film’s success was Disney’s embrace of YouTube. After the film was released in theaters, fans began uploading their own covers of the film’s hit song “Let It Go” to YouTube.
Disney could have easily asked the platform to remove the clips, but the entertainment giant chose instead to embrace the change and respect its audience, Vojsky said. “They simply let it happen,” she added.
She added that any industry will face change, which has dire consequences for companies as new technologies emerge and consumer preferences change.
“It seems strange, our instinct is to fight it. But we have to accept it and let it go,” she said.
In 2016, Fujisaki had insight into the changes coming to the media industry, saying, wealth Jennifer Ringgold The future will belong to individual creators who have the ability to build audiences on YouTube.
“They are their own media companies. They are the CEO, they are the personality, and then behind them as they grow up are the production, the editors, the writers, and so we really have this next generation of media companies,” she predicted.
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