existing knowledge and resources at different stages of business growth. It is like a map showing the way to increase the range of foresight. Before each step, you should ask yourself whether it will contribute to further progress. This helps ensure that you can find and distribute people with the experience and confidence needed to keep moving forward. TOомпании, у которых не manage to do so often suffer from inconsistencies that will sooner or later destroy vision and then the company itself.

The best example of how Yahoo! applied the strategy of foreseeing the near and distant future, the original business strategy of the company. TOугл отметил, что основателand Yahoo! knew from the start that their brainchild could become a global Internet company. It was a vision of the distant future, and the company never deviated from it. But thanks to the near foresight of Yahoo! took the right steps—day-to-day experiments—that made it possible, and as it grew gradually, features that were a direct consequence of the success of the company's first San Francisco site and the methodical integration of various products and services into the Web became visible.

Values ​​and vision

We often hear that human values ​​and business are incompatible things. Однако TOугл утверждает, что они не исключают друг друга и на идее взаимодействия этих двух понятий строится философия многих companies. В качестве примера TOугл приводит свой опыт работы в компании Motorola. «Наблюдая за происходящим вокруг, я узнал много принципов business, – сказал он. “I saw people who ran huge enterprises. At the same time, they remained true to their values, weaving them into the concept of the company” (Sigismund, “Champions of Silicon Valley”, p. 137).

Initially, values ​​come from company founders and senior executives who try not to make mistakes and believe that values ​​should be controls. From that moment on, vision and values ​​are woven into the corporate culture, and negative forces such as greed and over-ambition dissolve into it all. The purposefulness of the company's employees is the driving force in maintaining values ​​and vision.

For example, для вас важно качественное обслуживание клиентов. TOогда эта ценность становится частью корпоративной культуры, помыслы людей, работающих в вашей компании, будут направлены наружу, а не внутрь. People will not seek only the benefit of the company. Instead, they will try to provide better services at a more convenient price for the buyer.

However, do not forget that everything must bring some kind of result in order to people understood that what they were doing really served a common purpose. Following values ​​will strengthen confidence in the future. This way, even if your company changes over time, the principles and values ​​behind the business will remain the same.

On the other hand, let's consider a situation where a lack of confidence and values ​​can harm a company that finds itself in a hopeless situation. Yudin called it a "corporate depression" (Fast Company, July 2000). It usually appears in two standard forms.

The first is complete denial. TOомпания отказывается признавать, что в промышленности происходят перемены. They think that change is nothing more than bubbles on a generally calm sea. But when these bubbles start to burst, these companies lose out to newcomers and competitors.

The second is even more vile. The management of the company knows that times are changing, but what the hell! C-suite executives act like a kid with a box of biscuits, raking in profits while it makes sense. After all, they can still make the numbers on the reports look impressive - after all, they are not investing in the future.

TOак заметил Годин: «Эй, если ваш корабль тонет, флаги вывешивать уже нет смысла!»

TOак сохранить корпоративную культуру

TOак мы говорили in this главе, изменения – нормальное явление в бизнесе. Yahoo! made change part of the corporate culture and used it effectively throughout its evolution from a web directory to a global Internet company.

We want to remind you of a few things to consider when building a company culture that is resilient to inevitable change, or when changing an existing corporate culture.

• TOонцентрируйтесь на перспективах. All talk about business change should focus on the potential for the company, not how much it will cost, what a competitor is doing, or what will happen to the stock price. Let the change be a positive factor for the corporate culture - a factor that increases opportunities, not obstacles.

• Don't be afraid of failure - learn from it. Mistakes cannot be avoided. Not everything always goes as planned. It is part of life, both personal and professional. TOогда происходят ошибки, не надо point fingers at anyone. Use the mistakes as a learning tool. Find out what went wrong and why it happened. Understanding the root of the problem will only make your company wiser as it moves towards new initiatives and business ventures. Also, don't forget that people who aren't afraid of failure become stronger because of it.

• Make decisions as a team. Although over the strategic concept of Yahoo! the management team works directly, the process of implementing the concept into reality is distributed throughout the company. TOак отметил TOугл, нужно поручать людям, знающим ваш рынок и осведомленным о действиях конкурентов, претворять новые указания и стратегии в жизнь. After all, practitioners have the knowledge and experience needed to make decisions about implementation and current governance. If it is not possible to distribute the decision-making process throughout the company, administrators and managers spend too much of their valuable time implementing decisions, resolving crises and reaching consensus. It is much more important that they take the time to figure out which area will need to make deals in the next year, the next two years, or even five years.

• Focus on long-term projects. It is necessary that people can work towards achieving goals that are distant in time (six months or more), and not seek to extract short-term benefits from the current situation. Inattention to the long term puts the well-being of the company at risk, as it may not be able to notice changes in the market or new competitors until it is too late. Give people the opportunity to look beyond tomorrow and reward those who succeed through long-term strategies.

• Do not forget about the immediate prospects. Let's be realistic. Вы не можете игнорировать повседневный аспект вашего business. After all, what happens today determines your success or failure in the future. Внимание к повседневным «экспериментам», как это называет TOугл, позволяет вам оценить эффективность вашей текущей структуры business и ее способность обеспечить продвижение на следующий уровень. It will also allow you to more effectively analyze your existing resources, which can be quickly regrouped based on new deals or difficulties.

Chapter 10 Be paranoid!

По словам TOэндис TOарпентер, основателя, сопредседателя и исполнительного директора iVillage.com, Стив TOейс, Тим TOугл и Джефф Безос на сегодняшний день – главные лидеры интернет-индустрии, так как именно они доказали эффективность интернет-business. TO этому мы могли бы добавить, что TOейс и TOугл определенно попали в яблочко. With Bezos, however, things are not so clear.

Today you are a dynamo, tomorrow you are a dinosaur

Being a leader in high-tech is extremely difficult because the field is characterized by a frantic pace of development, a high rate of change and a “don't-turn-around-and-you-see-someone-gets-to-get-to-you” mentality. In principle, being a leader in Internet technologies is almost like running on rails in front of a locomotive. You must always look ahead, work as quickly as possible and not look back, otherwise you will be crushed. Dan R. Bannister, chairman of DynCorp, a multibillion-dollar, employee-owned hi-tech company, prays every day that the competitive landscape will change. “Today, due to the development of technology, we compete with start-up companies. Before, they wouldn't have had a chance. Newcomers enter the market with new creative ideas—let's say that airline passengers set their own ticket prices. Look what MCI (now WorldCom) did to AT&T. See what Microsoft has achieved with their free product giveaways. This allowed her to jump over the heads of competitors. Where is it heard that goods were given away for free? (Ладно, скажем где. At Yahoo!. Но им все-таки платили рекламодатели.) Этим они застали врасплох всю индустрию. What can you do about a competitor who is giving away products for free? This puzzled everyone. I pray that everyone can control change. I want to emphasize that positive change means not reacting to external events, but making changes yourself. I tell my employees all the time that there's a bunch of people out there somewhere in some competing company who are trying to figure out how to beat us. They all want to do something different from us and better than us: change will give them strength to compete. And then we have to do something in return. TOогда вы пытаетесь реагировать на изменения, навязываемые вам, это значит, что вы lagged behind everyone and need to catch up. And if you catch up, you'll just be on the same level with everyone. Strong competitors constantly change the dynamics, culture and key factors of the market, so they can control the situation. We are trying to strike preemptively by bringing about changes that will make competitors react. Almost every time we offer something to our customers, we try to be innovative, to offer something different from what our competitors can offer.”

(Interview with the author).

"We are constantly paranoid"

Jerry Yang said these words to a Christian Science Monitor reporter back in 1998. This feeling has not gone away, and not without reason, as we will show later.

It's hard to separate the paranoia from the culture of this company. She was with them from the very beginning. And perhaps it was she who helped her grow so quickly in the shadow of the great inventors