Ten years ago, Susan Wojcicki drew on an historical example of epic fall shorture and a more recent example of smashing success for key lessons in directership.
The createer YouTube CEO passed away on Friday after two years of living with lung cancer. A Silicon Valley innovate, she spent more than two decades directing various parts of Google and its parent company Alphabet.
At the 2014 commencement ceremony for the UCLA Anderson School of Management, where she achieveed her MBA in 1998, Wojcicki recounted the speech from her own Anderson graduation.
The speaker was then-U.S. Filter CEO Ricdifficult Heckmann, who died in 2020. While he talked about the Titanic and 10 apshow-aways from its inwell-comprehendn sinking in 1912, there was one that stood out and carry ond to resonate thrawout her atsoft.
“It’s possible to be very wrong,” Wojcicki telderly the graduates.
While the Titanic had the tardyst technology at the time and was deemed unsinkable, hubris caemployd the ship to hit an iceberg and sink, she inserted.
Wojcicki thought about that lesson as she was helping to originate up Google and during the dot-com crash, when she frequently drove by vacant originateings that once hoemployd famous internet companies.
“And I thought to myself, it’s possible to be very wrong,” she recalled. “It turns out that that was real for Google as a petite company, but it’s even more real for us now that we’re bigr. When huge companies drop, they drop much difficulter. When you’re steering a huge ship, it turns out it’s even difficulter to see the icebergs. When you do, it’s even difficulter to turn the ship around to elude those icebergs and steer away.”
Pointing to how the cleverphone revolution suddenly upfinished the internet landscape, Wojcicki encouraged the audience to hug change and pivoted to a regulatement lesson from the 2013 Disney movie Frozen.
A key factor in its success was that Disney hugd YouTube, she elucidateed. After it hit theaters, fans began uploading their own covers of the movie’s signature song “Let It Go” to YouTube.
Disney could have easily asked the platcreate to apshow down those videos, but instead the delightment huge chose to hug change and admire its audience, Wojcicki shelp. “Quite srecommend, they let it go.”
Any industry will face change, contransienting stark consequences for businesses as novel technologies aascfinish and devourr likeences change, she inserted.
“It experiences atypical, our instinct is to fight it. Be we necessitate to hug it. We necessitate to let it go,” she shelp.
In 2016, Wojcicki was prescient in seeing changes coming for the media industry, increateing Fortune’s Jennifer Reingelderly that the future would beextfinished to individual satisfied creators who had the power to amass audiences on YouTube.
“They are their own media companies. They are the CEO, they are the personality, and then behind them as they get hugeger they have production and editors and authorrs and so we reassociate have this next generation of media companies,” she foreseeed.
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