Cloud Surfing: A book review by Bob Morris

Cloud Surfing: A New Way to Think About Risk, Innovation, Scale, and Success
Thomas M. Koulopoulos
Bibliomotion (2012)

Why and how hyperconnectivity technologies will help “builders of a brave new future”

In the Introduction, Thomas Koulopoulos asks, what is the “single greatest phenomenon contributing to global growth, prosperity, and social and political change over the past two hundred years?”   I don’t what your answer is but mine was wrong. “It is the dramatic increase in connections. Not just an increase in person-to-person connections [but also] an increase in connections between every machine, device, process, and person.” What Koulopoulos has in mind – and addresses in this book – involves more, far more than a network of computers “that can be used in the sane way as an electric utility.” His purpose is to examine and explain a variety of forces “that are driving fundamental changes in behavior for individuals, businesses, and nations.”

Koulopoulos provides a wealth of information, insights, and counsel to help prepare his reader to understand issues and achieve strategic objectives such as these:

o   What the cloud is…and isn’t
o   The cloud’s most promising potentialities
o   The evolution of different cloud models (e.g. “time to community”) How each model can deliver value over time
o   How to manage the “pull-driven” framework of personalization
o   Key considerations: transparency, security, and trust
o   How and why mobility is a “killer app”
o   Multi-derivative forms of innovation
o   The relevance of commerce to alignment of investments, value, and risk
o   Cloudsourcing’s most promising options and opportunities

I agree with Koulopoulos, “The greatest possession in the coming century will be the community and the connections we form within the cloud.” It is important to keep in mind how much more time and effort will be needed as the human race makes its way to what the cloud represents, “the extremities of markets and the economy to which the power has been slowly but surely shifting for centuries.” Thomas Koulopoulos concludes his brilliant book with a bold, compelling vision: “Why not move the power further into the hands of the people who make up the communities, to amplify their voices and ambitions well beyond today’s constraints?”

Why not indeed?

What Is Marissa Mayer’s Secret Weapon?

Here is a brief excerpt from an article written by Steven Levy for Wired magazine. To read the complete article, check out other resources, and sign up for email alerts, please click here.

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Everyone agrees that one of Marissa Mayer’s most urgent tasks at Yahoo will be hiring great managers and product people. Yahoo’s talent pool has been reduced to puddles, as the best techies have gone elsewhere and promising newcomers have come down with colorblindness when it comes to purple.  Some people wonder whether even Mayer can lure back the brains.

It turns out, though, that the new CEO has a unique advantage in fulfilling this quest. For the past decade, she has been the doyen of a collection of some of the most talented young engineers and product managers in all of technology. These are the hand-selected prime talents of an accelerated leadership program at Google called Associate Product Manager (APM).

Mayer invented this program, led it and never gave it up. It was a key part of her tenure at Google. And now she may reap some benefits.

Don’t be fooled by the modest title, prefixed by that timid word “associate.” The most coveted entry post at Google is spelled APM. This is an incubation system for tech rock stars. “The APM program is one of our core values — I’d like to think of one of them as the eventual CEO of the company,” Google’s Executive Chair Eric Schmidt once told me.

Consider the first APM, a fresh Stanford grad named Brian Rakowski. He became a key leader of the team that built the Chrome browser and now is the VP of the Chrome operation. The second was Wesley Chan, who made Google Toolbar a success, then launched Google Analytics and Google Voice. He’s now picking winners for Google Ventures. Another early APM was Bret Taylor, who earned his bones by launching Google Maps. He left Google and co-founded Friendfeed, then become the Chief Technical Officer of Facebook.

Though not all APMs achieve such glory, they are generally recognized as elite. At any given time at Google, there are over 40 APMs active in the two-year program. And since Google has been hiring them since the early 2000s there are over 300 who have been through the program.

And the glue to the whole shebang was Marissa Mayer, who was the APM boss, mentor, den mother and role model.

Mayer thought up the program in early 2002. Google had been struggling to find PMs who could work within the peculiar company culture — team leaders who would not be bosses but work consensually with the wizards who produce code. Ideally, a Google product manger would understand the technical issues and sway the team to his or her viewpoint by strong data-backed arguments, and more than a bit of canny psychology. But experienced PMs from places like Microsoft, or those with MBAs, didn’t understand the Google way, and tried to force their views on teams.

So Mayer came up with an idea: Google would hire computer science majors who just graduated or had been in the workplace fewer than 18 months. The ideal applicants must have technical talent, but not be total programming geeks — APMs had to have social finesse and business sense. Essentially they would be in-house entrepreneurs. They would undergo a multi-interview hiring process that made the Harvard admissions regimen look like community college. The chosen ones were thrown into deep water, heading real, important product teams. (As the first APM, Rakowski was asked to launch a nascent project called Gmail. By the way, I hear Rakowski is taking over the program now that Mayer is gone.) “We give them way too much responsibility,” Mayer once told me, “to see if they can handle it.” Also, Google had APMs perform tasks for top management, like note-taking at high-level executive meetings or drawing up white papers on ambitious potential products.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Steven Levy’s deep dive into Google, In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works and Shapes Our Lives, was published in April, 2011. Steven also blogs at StevenLevy.com.

You can check out Steve’s Google+ Profile by clicking here.