Google talks innovation
As the energy sector grapples with a disruptive time for the industry, it’s not alone in looking over its collective shoulder.
Google, one of today’s great disrupters, is preoccupied with similar issues.
The tech giant has not figured it out by asking “the Google,” but has recognized it exists in a space where future growth cannot be taken for granted, given all the other disrupters playing in the same market.
“We are a bit of a disrupter and we work in a disruptive ecosystem so there are ways we have had to work to survive,” said Sam Sebastian, managing director of Google Canada, who has been with the company for the past decade. “We are cautiously paranoid.”
Surprising words, perhaps, but an important lesson for the energy sector. If Google is thinking about what’s next, where does that leave more traditional segments of the economy like the oilpatch?
Sebastian, who spoke Thursday at the Global Business Forum, said the oilpatch needs to reconsider how it got in a position where it was able to exploit a resource and make it profitable.
“The energy sector historically has been the most innovative and imaginative of businesses in various different sectors,” he said in an interview. “They have that DNA in them. I am pretty optimistic about Canada overall and the energy sector.”
So what lessons from Google’s success can be applied within the energy sector and more broadly to Canada’s innovation ecosystem?
Google, which turned 18 on Tuesday, strictly adheres to a set of six principles that Sebastian said have been important to its ability to continue to be a company to which others aspire. And it sounds simple. A clear set of principles, he said, function as the “North Star” for the company’s 65,000 employees, including a strong culture of internal communication and transparency that sees the founders hold a town hall every week and includes the sharing of quarterly board presentations.
Employees are empowered to bring forward ideas in an organization that is flat, not hierarchical.
It’s also about having the discipline that says data trumps opinions and drives decisions, where employees are allowed to “bluesky” 20 per cent of their work time for the pursuit of new ideas and concepts. That practice has produced a number of successful initiatives, including Gmail.
But mostly it’s about not being afraid to think big; to think of the moon shot and ideas that could have an impact that is tenfold, not 10 per cent.
Canada’s culture of innovation is often described as too timid, with fingers pointed to stories of Nortel and Blackberry, a company that changed the way the world communicates but didn’t pivot quickly enough before rivals played the role of disrupter and sent it in the direction announced this week where it will no longer manufacture handsets.
Sebastian, who lives in Toronto but came from Silicon Valley, looks at it through a different lens that dispels the myth surrounding a lack of innovative thinking while reinforcing the importance of innovation clusters.
He rattles off Canadian tech companies that have grabbed headlines — Shopify and Hoot-Suite among them — and talks of the more than 800 startups that inhabit the Kitchener-Waterloo tech corridor.
He’s optimistic the talent that built Blackberry will fuel the development of another disruptive, Canadian player in the tech world. What’s critical, he said, is making sure the younger generation is equipped to feed into the innovation ecosystem and able to broaden it across the country.
That’s a conversation that leads Sebastian, and many others, to the issue of education and the need to focus on boosting the STEM quotient — Science, Technology Engineering, Math — in the student population.
Also important is access to capital, which Sebastian said isn’t an issue for a company that has a good idea.
“If you have a good idea and a good team, you can get money,” he said. Above all, it’s about taking risks. A recent study published by the accounting firm Deloitte decried the lack of “corporate courage” in Canada and the mentality that accepts incremental change rather than seeking transformational change.
We need to be more comfortable swinging for the fences, and not being afraid to fail. To do a better job of celebrating our successes in this country. Those stories inspire others to take risks.
If we are to diversify Canada’s economy so it competes globally on a value-added basis into the next century, these are some of factors that need to be considered and actively pursued.
We need to think more, well, like Google.