Category Archives: Management
Seagate goes ‘City Slickers’ route?
It’s what Watkins, 53, says at the start of every Eco Seagate, the annual
$2 million mother of all team-building events held at the bottom of the world.
That’s a lot to spend on what looks like a boondoggle. What does running
around the southern Alps have to do with engineering? Nothing, actually,
and that’s the point. The glaciers of New Zealand’s South Island form an
environment completely unfamiliar to the average tech worker. It’s expansive,
glorious, and awe-inspiring, but it’s also uncertain and intimidating, making
everyone feel off balance. Of course Watkins isn’t trying to kill his charges.
But he is making them uncomfortable as a way to open their minds. He thinks
Eco week, which Seagate has been holding since 2000, helps build a more
collaborative, team-oriented company. He also thinks it teaches his people
something about priorities.
More at Fortune.com
Related Links
City Slickers in IMDB
Where does google go next
A basic tenet of Google’s way of doing business is that it is not like other
businesses. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin celebrated this quality in
their famous letter to prospective shareholders before the company’s
2004 IPO, and they promised to keep things that way. For example,
Google’s operations themselves are unconventional. One of the most
fundamental precepts of modern management has to do with how to
allocate resources: deciding which projects to pursue, where to spend
money, when to take a pass. In fact, MBAs learn in their first classes at
business school that resource allocation is a manager’s most important
task. Yet it’s a concept that, while not exactly alien to Google’s
top dogs, isn’t their highest priority.
After all, why focus on allocating scarce
resources when the resources aren’t all that scarce?
At the end of the first quarter Google had cash and
other liquid assets of $12 billion; it generates almost
$2 billion of cash per quarter.
More at Fortune.com