Bahcall: Google and McKinsey remove promotion decisions from direct managers
Safi Bahcall · a16z Podcast | Incenting Innovation Inside, Loonshots to Moonshots · Apr 1, 2019 · at 44:44
Author Safi Bahcall explains how organizations can reduce internal political lobbying by changing how promotion decisions are made.
0:00 / 0:07exact quote · 7.5s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Some companies, actually Google does this, and McKinsey does this, and others, they take the promotion decisions completely away from the manager.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Safi Bahcall
Bahcall: Market projections kill early-stage innovation, especially in drug discovery
“Nothing kills a great idea faster and has been more of a disaster to innovation, certainly in my industry in drug discovery, than the idea of market projections.”
Bahcall: Companies reliant on top-down visionary leaders eventually fail
“So all the companies across history that have done that have failed spectacularly. They may survive for a while, you know, when there's a Moses on the mountain with a staff anointing the next holy loon shot. They may survive for a while, that's the hysteresis …”
Bahcall: Ancient empires stifled innovation much like modern big pharma
“China, India, and the Islamic empires were a lot like the Merck, Pfizer, and Novartis of today. They were global, everywhere, dominant. They're phenomenal at franchises. So in India, you've had the Taj Mahal. You know, in China, they built the Great Wall and j…”
Bahcall: Corporate innovation fails in transferring ideas, not generating them
“Because where innovation fails is not in the supply of new idea. It's in the transfer of those new ideas to the field.”
Bahcall: Sustained tech success requires valuing operators and creators equally
“And only by evolving and learning to love his artists and shoulders equally, that's when Things really took off. And that's why Vannevar Bush succeeded, and so many scientists before him failed, because soldiers love soldiers, artists love artists. He not only…”
Bahcall: The transistor was originally an incremental innovation at Bell Labs
“It was developed at Bell Labs, although it was based on a lot of federal research, but it was developed at Bell Labs while they were looking for better switches. By every definition, it was an incremental innovation, not a quote disruptive.”