Ten years ago, Susan Wojcicki drew on historical examples of great failure and recent examples of great success as key lessons in leadership.
The former YouTube executive died Friday after a two-year battle with lung cancer. A Silicon Valley pioneer, she spent more than two decades leading various divisions of Google and its parent company, Alphabet.
Wojcicki, who earned her MBA from the UCLA Anderson School of Management in 1998, recounted her 2014 commencement speech.
The speaker was Richard Heckmann, the then CEO of American Filter, who passed away in 2020. One takeaway stood out and continued to resonate throughout her career.
“This could be very wrong,” Wojcicki told the graduates.
She added that although the Titanic had the latest technology at the time and was considered unsinkable, hubris led to the ship hitting an iceberg and sinking.
Wojcicki thought about this lesson while helping to create Google and during the dot-com bust, when she often drove past empty buildings that once housed famous internet companies.
“I thought to myself, this could be very wrong,” she recalled. “It turns out that’s true for Google as a small company, but it’s even more true for us as a much larger company now. When big companies fail, they fail harder. When you sail a big ship, It’s even harder to spot icebergs and when you do that, it’s even harder to turn the ship around to avoid those icebergs and sail away.
Wojcicki noted how the smartphone revolution suddenly upended the online landscape, urging viewers to embrace the change and turn to management lessons in the 2013 Disney film freezing.
A key factor in its success, she explained, was Disney’s embrace of YouTube. After the movie was released, fans began uploading their own versions of the movie’s signature song “Let It Go” to YouTube.
Wojcicki said Disney could have easily asked the platform to remove the videos, but the entertainment giant chose to embrace change and respect its audience. “Quite simply, they just let it go.”
She added that as new technologies emerge and consumer preferences change, any industry will face change, with serious consequences for businesses.
“This feels unusual and our instinct is to fight it. We need to embrace it. We need to let it go,” she said.
In 2016, Wojcicki presciently saw the changes coming to the media industry, telling us of wealth Jennifer Reingold believes that the future will belong to individual content creators who have the ability to attract audiences on YouTube.
“They are their own media company. They are the CEO, they are the personality, and then as they get bigger they have production, editors and writers behind them, so we really have the next generation of media companies,” she predicted .
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