Larry Page on Getting the Job Done

Fortune interviewed Google's Larry Page, who is one of those guys who really has a nice handle on the big picture.. Like his partner Sergey Brin, Page is one of a small but growing group of very smart, very wealthy, and very innovative business leaders who are shaping not only the way *they* do business but the way the rest of us live our lives.

Page offers some direct and simple advice - we need more people thinking and working on innovations and solutions. He's right of course. My view is that a combination of politics, bureaucracy, and human inadequacies stand in the way of innovation. Evolution did not reward highly experimental, rational thinking as well as short term emotional responses. For example while Neanderthal Ned was carefully thinking about better ways to get away from the Lion pack who lived nearby, Neanderthal Bob simply ran for the hills or sharpened his spears. Bob went on to populate our world while thinker Ned simply became ... dinner.

Silly simplifications aside, humans are not particularly well equipped to be high order problem solving and we never will be. Fortunately for us we can now rely on machines to handle the calculation parts of the equations. Unfortunately for us machine intelligence will have to improve very dramatically before it can do all the work. Until then we'll need to do a better job of identifying key problems and starting to frame solutions to those problems, as well as trying to think in ways that identify general patterns of solutions to problems we cannot even see yet.

Tinkering Your Way To Success

If statistician and author Nassim Nicholas Taleb is right in this Forbes article, we tend to underrate the power of random tinkering and events that are outside of our control with respect to business failure and success:

Random tinkering is the path to success. And fortunately, we are increasingly learning to practice it without knowing it--thanks to overconfident entrepreneurs, naive investors, greedy investment bankers, confused scientists and aggressive venture capitalists brought together by the free-market system.

[thanks to WebGuild commenter Atolley for the heads up on this author]

Randomness is a major component of biological evolution and I would suggest that business and evolution have a lot in common, most importantly the notion that both biological and business entities work *away from failure* rather than *towards success*. Events both random and controlled continue to change the playing field, making it difficult to find consistent formulas for success, let alone even predict which among a dozen companies will survive into profitability and business success.

Yahoo to Microsoft - We Are Worth $40 Per Share

Yahoo initially spurned Microsoftś offer of $31 per share arguing that it was far too little and that a merger was not in the interest of Yahoo shareholders. Jerry Yang, in a letter to shareholders about a month ago, vaguely outlined his vision of a Yahoo that would improve in the coming years. The Yahoo improvement plan has now been articulated in much greater detail along with assumptions about new revenue coming from advertising and expansion of Yahoo properties. Lots of new revenue claims Yahoo. Leading tech market watcher Henry Blodget provides an excellent financial breakdown here. Henry is skeptical of the assumptions but agrees that if they are accurate then Yahoo is indeed worth $40-50 per share.

I see this move as something of a Hail Mary pass to stave off a merger, with the added bonus of trying to justify another few dollars increase on the bid from Microsoft before what now appears to be a very likely takeover of Yahoo. Shareholder discontent is high enough that Microsoft need not do much to win a proxy fight with the existing Yahoo board.

Disclosure: Long on YHOO

Mashups for the Enterprise

Here at Mashup Camp, Serena is talking about the business mashup space and promoting their tools to simplify the creation and deployment of mashups for large as well as small businesses. Their main focus seems to be the enterprise space with business mashups. Examples include everything from risk tracking to human resources management. www.Serena.com