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Historically Google (GOOG) hasn't been known to curb its enthusiasm for novelty, but when Larry Page took over as CEO and started culling the Googleplex's fabled 20% projects it looked like an attempt to become a more normal, mainstream company. Google Fiber and Google Glasses are two innovative projects that together seem to expose the fallacy of that thinking. But do they?
In fact Google is doing what every CEO in the country should be doing, exploring different ways of assembling the economy of the future. The norm should be a willingness to take on major projects outside a company's core areas.
Neither Google nor America will be the first to deploy an ultra-fast Internet however. The Netherlands enjoyed LAN speeds on its cable networks in the 1990s and is already upgrading to a Gigabit network to the home.
So in a sense Google is playing catch up, and the question you might ask is why Google and why not a conventional telecom operator? The answer is clearly that Google is frustrated by the way the Internet is evolving in its back yard, America having already conceded the innovation high ground in mobile, first to Europe and then to Africa.
But those are points for a different discussion. What Google has consistently shown over the past decade is that a company does not have to be hidebound by outdated ideas of core competency. Companies with intelligent CEOs need to ditch the idea that there is a core competency driving their profitability or driving stakeholder value.
In a smart connected world it is possible to acquire expertise and to assemble resources on the back of your brand power and your connections, and those of your people. And one proof of that is Fiber, a search company stringing out fiber optic cable, offering it packaged with its own Tablet as a controller, and with its own TV packages.
The message that I think it sends out to companies hoarding cash is this. The economy you dream of will not be revived. Your working practices, your products, your services and your relationships belong to the pre-2007 era. Now is now. Just like Google and Amazon, and to a lesser extent Apple, you need to reinvent the objects and benefits you sell and you need to contribute to this wider project, the reinvention of American infrastructure, personal activities, relationships and work.
To date the Internet age has signally failed to elevate human experience. We work harder, faster, smarter and to a new level of exhaustion, giving up family time and relationship time along the way. A smart CEO would see opportunity here, just like smart people in the 1960s saw opportunity in creating the soundtrack of our lives through music, song, festivals and liberated lifestyles. Now, Google Fiber and Google Glasses won’t do that but we should be creating an agenda that asks where will that change come from and when, really, is the creative economy going to become… well creative, and enrich our lives? And every smart CEO needs to be asking as well: what role do they have to play in constructing lifestyles that will be as different from 2006 as those in the 1960s were from 1945.
