Always Day One
Description
Market trends change at a rapid pace. Based on statistics, only
4% of startups in the U.S. survive over ten years. Amazon, Meta
(Facebook), Google, and Microsoft are market leaders out of
this 4%. These companies have distinct business cultures that
help propel them above their peers. It is precisely because their
leaders possess an engineering mindset and apply it to business
management that these companies have thrived. As a result, they
carve out innovative corporate cultures with diverse forms but a
similar DNA at their core.
Author: Alex Kantrowitz
Alex Kantrowitz graduated from Cornell University's School of
Industrial and Labor Relations with a background in sales and
marketing. He was a senior technology journalist at Buzzfeed
News. After leaving Buzzfeed, he founded a podcast called "Big
Technology" and is currently working at CNBC. His reporting
has been cited by the New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal,
Sports Illustrated, and many other well-known media
publications. He has also won the Mirror Award for excellence
in media reporting and appeared as a commentator on CNN and
BBC News numerous times.
Overview
Today, we will unlock the book Always Day One: How the Tech
Titans Plan to Stay on Top Forever.
When you think of Big Tech, Amazon, Meta (Facebook),
Google, Apple, and Microsoft might instantly come to mind.
These enterprises have thrived in peer competitions and
overcome numerous twists and turns. Eventually, they became
the leading entities in their industries. However, the tech
industry is perpetually competitive. No current success
guarantees prospects and companies can't afford to take victories
lightly. For instance, when Twitter was founded, Facebook was
its only comparable competitor. But Instagram, Snapchat, and
other social media have emerged since then, and users who
might otherwise have been with Facebook have since migrated
over to these platforms. If Facebook falls a step behind in such a
competitive market, it risks losing a sizable chunk of its
customer base.
So how do some of these tech giants stay ahead of the curve?
That is what we will explore in this book.
To learn the secrets of how Big Tech operates, author Alex
Kantrowitz dug deep into their company cultures and explored
how they contribute to these companies’ continued success. As a
journalist in Silicon Valley, Kantrowitz observed the tech giants
up close and personal. This book is the culmination of some two
years of research; over 130 interviews were conducted,
including those with the CEOs and senior executives at these
tech giants.
Kantrowitz discovered that running business operations grew
more challenging for the leaders with their companies'
expansion. This urged the senior executives to rethink the way
they conducted business. Many of them, including Mark
Zuckerberg of Facebook, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Sundar Pichai
of Google, and Satya Nadella, started as engineers. As a result,
they managed their businesses differently from others. These
leaders built an innovative corporate culture based on their own
work routines and engineering mindsets. The most distinctive
characteristic of their systems is that they prized innovation
across the company, not just in certain positions or levels. This
is notably different from companies that rely solely on a
department or a specialist team for innovation.
In the upcoming sections, we will elaborate on applying the
engineering mindset in innovative cultures through three parts:
Part One: Encouraging democratic invention
Part Two: Establishing a constraint-free hierarchy
Part Three: Promoting cooperation between departments.
(1) Encouraging democratic innovation
Democratic invention means giving employees the initiative and
autonomy to develop creative ideas for the business. Leaders in
the company will then have enough context to shortlist the better
ideas.
The most crucial aspect of the democratic invention is that
employees have the autonomy to contribute opinions and even
form their own teams to execute plans. Moreover, tying the
submission of ideas with execution prevents workers from
raising impractical notions. Instead, it propels them to think
thoroughly about the project, taking every aspect into account,
including creativity and implementation, to produce ideas that
are more viable to be carried out.
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, created a "six-page memos"
approach to gathering employee suggestions. He asked
employees to present their innovations on memo paper within
six pages using plain text. This way of presenting removed
dramatic PowerPoint effects, such as bullet-point listing,
beautiful typography, and colorful layouts to mask potential
shortfalls of content. This method also makes it easier to judge
an insight with detailed product information, services, and
relevant data. As a result, the more logical, intact insights get
singled out for consideration.
When an employee prepares a six-page memo at Amazon, they
can request a meeting with the senior management to pitch their
idea. For fifteen minutes to an hour, the top managers need to
examine the memo conscientiously and make a judgment call on
whether to bring the concept to life. If the project is approved,
the employee who provided the concept gets a budget and the
option to build their team to execute the plan. After employees
incubate their project, Amazon's chiefs will evaluate the results
and decide whether to invest in the project officially and
introduce it to the market. This workflow has led to the
introduction of many new Amazon products and services and
kept the company ahead of the game.
However, having a system that encourages innovation alone is
not enough. For example, if employees are occupied with
administration and repetitive work, there will be little time for
brainstorming. Therefore, reducing monotonous procedures and
improving work efficiency are also essential. To that end, many
tech companies are starting to incorporate artificial intelligence
into their businesses to solve the issue of repetitive work.
Let's stick with Amazon for another example. The multinational
technology company has implemented a program called "Hands
Off the Wheel" to automate many processes at the company.
One of them is to use artificial intelligence to assist supplier
managers in estimating orders. Since Amazon offers next-day
delivery to its customers, the logistics center needs to have
products ready for ordering. Therefore, Amazon hired multiple
supplier managers to predict the demand. For instance, the
manager in charge of Tide products will estimate the amount of
detergent each depot needs to store, when products should be in
place, and how much Amazon pays for each item. Then, the
manager negotiates the price with Tide and eventually places an
order. In 2012, Amazon decided to automate the evaluation
process, using algorithms to predict and purchase. As a result,
the supplier manager now only needed to approve the execution,
which significantly raised their work efficiency and offered
them more time for innovation.
Some companies are also building machine learning systems to
upgrade their AI databases and develop employee skills for
better engagement.
Soon after Facebook launched its Live platform, a woman who
was shot chose to leave her will on Facebook Live instead of
calling the emergency services. This incident brought to light the
sheer number of violent incidents on the platform. Facebook
started using AI to proactively flag and censor posts and pass
them on to human operatives for confirmation to address the
problem. But the AI system relies on the examiners to input the
correct screening data. Therefore, Facebook developed tools like
Cortex and Rosetta to help employees instruct the AI systems on
what types of posts to monitor.
With the aid of these tools, Facebook's employees are now
afforded more time to focus on creating new ideas, and its
leadership has enough energy to evaluate these thoughts and put
them into practice.
These AI systems can also become tools for employee
innovation. Even those with limited skills and knowledge of AI
can program through machine learning systems. Lobe, which
Microsoft acquired in 2018, is a great example. It enables people
with limited technical skills to construct programs supported by
machine learning. Applying his knowledge on buoyancy, a
co-founder of Lobe who understood the basics of AI
successfully created a program, a monitoring system for the
water level of his home with the help of machine learning.
That brings us to the end of Part One, where we looked at how
tech giants innovate within their companies. First, they give
employees the autonomy to submit ideas and put those ideas into
practice. Second, they use artificial intelligence to reduce
repetitive tasks and give employees more time and tools to
innovate.
(2) Establishing an unconstrained hierarchy
To craft an innovative business culture, we need to stimulate
enthusiasm and the vitality of innovation throughout the
company. This requires liberation from job leveling.
Unfortunately, many companies are rigid with their job
hierarchies and offer few channels for employees to express
their opinions, making it difficult to build an innovation
environment.
Apple is one example of a company that adopts traditional
hierarchies. Under Jobs' management, Apple's workflow had
been top-down, with the CEO generating ideas and teams
refining them. While many have praised the concept, it deprived
employees of opportunities to develop innovative product ideas,
and Apple's internal technology lagged far behind its
competitors. When Tim Cook took over the mantle of CEO, the
flaws in Apple's hierarchy system became even more apparent.
Their earlier products, such as HomePod and self-driving cars,
failed to impress. The reasons trace back to their strict job
classification within the company. Apple employees lacked
channels to raise opinions to their superiors, and the
management team was wholly separated from those on the
ground level. Naturally, the company had limited its pathways
for innovations.
As we will see, to build an innovative corporate culture, it is
necessary to abolish rigid job classifications.
Microsoft had a stern job leveling system when Steve Ballmer
was CEO. There was no pathway for general employees to voice
their ideas to senior management. This discouraged them from
going above their direct supervisors. Executives tended to bark
orders at employees rather than solicit feedback. This strict
hierarchy also led to a surplus of middle-management roles.
These mid-level managers convened for endless meetings
whenever a top decision was being made, dragging out the
progress of other projects. As a result, Microsoft gradually lost
ground against the competition.
Things changed with the arrival of the new CEO, Satya Nadella.
In his book Hit Refresh, he openly criticized the company's
hierarchy. "Our culture had been rigid," he wrote. "Hierarchy
and pecking order had taken control, and spontaneity and
creativity suffered as a result." Nadella has teamed up with
lower-level employees to reduce mid-level management's power
to change the structure of the company’s job classification.
Nadella reiterated that management couldn't be an obstacle to
their operations in leadership meetings. Nadella's book Hit
Refresh expresses his vision for ending job leveling among
ordinary employees. At the same time, these grass-root workers
would also promote an anti-hierarchical culture to their
superiors. The company worked from top-down and vice versa
to press the middle managers and force the enterprise to make
cultural changes.
In addition to abolishing job hierarchies, creating a
constraint-free culture requires employee feedback.
Microsoft held annual meetings during Ballmer's tenure, where
executives handed out regulations and orders and rarely listened
to employees. When Nadella became CEO of Microsoft, he
wanted to free employees from the shackles of hierarchy and
stimulate their morale and creativity. So, he followed
Facebook’s suit and set up a feedback culture. Nadella stopped
holding annual meetings and replaced them with yearly
employee get-togethers and Hackathons called "One Week."
During these get-togethers, any employee can put forward their
opinions. Administrative assistants and legal and finance staff
also develop ideas to help engineers and managers understand
the basic needs of other company elements. In addition, Nadella
often holds Q&A sessions, giving employees a chance to
communicate directly with management. He also takes young
employees out for meals to wrack their brains on startups and
where the technology world is headed.
Facebook has a similar communication mechanism. To sustain
users' interest in the product, the most important thing is to
collect data and stay innovative constantly. Zuckerberg created a
feedback system that brought new information from the bottom
up to the very top. Facebook employees undergo feedback
training courses as soon as they join the company to learn how
to give feedback to colleagues properly. If anyone spots
something that they believe can be improved, whether to a
colleague, a leader, or even Zuckerberg himself, they know the
pathway to doing so.
After receiving employee feedback, management must treat
these opinions with an impartial attitude regardless of the level
of the employee who submitted them and how different the
proposed ideas might be from their own. Zuckerberg himself
never shies away from opposing views. He even enlisted Peter
Thiel, a controversial venture capitalist, to join Facebook's
board, who often pushed ideas that Zuckerberg personally
disagreed with.
This system also helped Facebook overcome a major crisis. In
2013, Snapchat attracted an incredible number of users when it
introduced a feature called "Stories." This function allowed
people to share photos and videos that would disappear in a day,
which greatly solved users' concerns about their privacy. Around
the time when Snapchat started to gain market share, an
18-year-old developer named Michael Sayman was hired by
Facebook as a full-time engineer, and in his orientation, he
learned about the feedback system. Before the orientation
concluded, he started analyzing teens of his age who were using
technology and how Facebook could attract them in greater
numbers. Sayman's presentation failed to impress the CEO at
first. However, Zuckerberg was convinced by the product
development manager and gave Sayman a small team to
experiment his idea. Sayman helped Zuckerburg understand
Snapchat's way of online socializing. Before Snapchat gained
too much ground, the Facebook-owned brand Instagram
launched Instagram Stories and recaptured its customer base.
Imagine the danger Facebook would have faced if Zuckerberg
had dismissed Sayman's ideas simply because he was a rookie.
That concludes the second part of this book. We looked at how
constraint-free hierarchies are built inside tech giants. First, the
goal of establishing unconstrained job leveling in a business is to
abolish any rigid systems in place. Second, companies must
encourage employees to give feedback and actively listen to
their opinions. Finally, management should eliminate prejudice
based on age and experience of employees and treat different
opinions equally.
(3) Promoting cooperation between departments
In addition to setting up an equal system between superiors and
subordinates, it is also essential to value horizontal relations in
the company to build an innovative business culture. That is, an
enterprise must promote cooperation between various
departments.
Internal communications tools are a solid choice for tech giants.
Google operates slightly differently from its peers because a
new Google product often requires the collaboration of many
different departments. For instance, the Google Assistant service
integrates Google Search, Maps, News, Photos, Android,
YouTube, and more applications into one cohesive product. This
product requires intensive collaboration across groups. In
addition, Google has a range of internal communications tools
that make this kind of teamwork possible. These tools improve
workflow efficiency, cultivate collective consciousness, and
enhance employee connections within the company.
Moreover, there is a complete corporate directory on Google's
internal work platform. Any Googler can view another
colleague's management level, position, email address, and
calendar to book appointments. Googlers can connect people
they want to work with through the platform or schedule a
meeting on their calendar. Aside from work, employees can also
use internal communication tools to find peers of similar
interests to communicate with.
Internal social media tools allow Google employees to maintain
healthy social relationship, collaborate freely and share ideas
quickly throughout the company. Google also has its own
internal social media tool called Memegen, a website where
Googlers can post memes and comment on internal matters. It is
another way for management to understand employees'
sentiments and opinions.
Promoting collaboration also requires making each group's work
transparent across the company. In addition to their internal
communications tools, Googlers also rely on Google Drive to
communicate plans, meeting notes, financial information, and
presentations. The files in Drive are readily accessible across the
entire company, which gives employees instant access to
information. As a result, Googlers can do research on company
projects, discuss ideas with colleagues effortlessly, and these
ultimately drive innovation.
By contrast, Apple has always taken measures to keep separate
departments' information confidential as its culture is drastically
different from those of the other four in the Big Five. Their way
of concealing information hinders the efficiency of innovation
and makes it difficult for employees to cooperate across separate
departments.
Apple's product development is shrouded in extreme secrecy,
with most of the company's employees kept in the dark.
Management believes this system minimizes distraction for
workers and allows them to focus solely on the products they are
responsible for. Apple employees who wish to discuss their
ongoing projects with colleagues must first obtain official
disclosure permission. This secrecy helps Apple surprise
customers when it launches new products and keeps both the
media and fans in the dark until products are market-ready.
However, this approach has hurt Apple's internal collaboration
apparatus. In the case of Siri, the team working on the project
should have collaborated with other divisions to fit Siri's
functions with other products for greater success. Still, Apple
chose to stick to its close-lipped approach. This prevented team
members from interacting with other parties and prevented the
Siri service from fully realizing its capabilities.
Furthermore, the lack of transparency between departments has
been known to stymie the workflow of various projects. Apple's
work process starts with executives producing ideas, designers
shaping products based on those ideas, and engineers and
product managers filling in the details. However, the
information does not communicate easily between the designers
and engineers during this process. For example, the design team
imagined Siri as a magical human-like entity because they had
no insights into engineering difficulties. Similarly, engineers
couldn't implement the design team's vision and had to
compromise Siri's performance significantly. This resulted in a
spate of issues, such as the slow development of products
involving Siri.
It takes more than information disclosure and internal
communication tools for all departments to work cohesively. It
is also necessary to shape an open and harmonious working
atmosphere. Imagine a company filled with malicious intentions
of power-hoarding and bitter competition. This approach to
business would be an encumbrance of innovation and company
development.
Apple has an internal division called Information Systems &
Technology (IS&T) that develops the majority of the company's
internal technology tools. The group is composed of contractors
from opposing consulting agencies. Archana Sabapathy, a
contractor who has worked for IS&T on two occasions, claimed
that working in the department was a daily cold war. Different
agencies compete for slots instead of focusing on their projects.
As we can see from this case, an enterprise needs to create an
open and harmonious workplace to turn bitter competition into
efficient collaboration.
Like Apple's IS&T, Microsoft's divisions under Ballmer's lead
were a shambles. Microsoft was often at war with itself due to
conflicts of interest between its various departments. The Office
group, for example, wanted the software to be available
everywhere and reach a broad market. But Microsoft's asset
division wanted Office to be available primarily via desktop
installs by limiting Office to Windows devices. As a result, the
friction between the two sides significantly hindered their work
progress.
Fortunately, Nadella brought change to Microsoft after taking
over. He first instilled a growth mindset into the whole company.
He emphasized that everyone needed to work together to
achieve growth as a whole instead of fighting against each other
for departmental benefits. He then restructured Microsoft's
divisions after everyone was aboard the growth mindset train.
He split the Windows group in two, with most Windows team
members moving into a voice and AI unit to work with their
former foe, Azure. The rest of the Windows team migrated into
a New Experience and Devices division, which worked with the
Office group to resolve the problem of conflicting interests.
Nadella has also changed the company's performance evaluation
system. He redesigned the entire review system, which resulted
in employees bickering with each other. The new system
removed the mandatory rankings and reduced the weight of
individual influence to one-third of the overall performance.
Other portions of the review are decided by what the employees
did to assist the work of others. From this change, Microsoft
employees finally started learning how to cooperate.
After a series of efforts, Microsoft gradually emerged from its
decline in the market.
That concludes Part Three of this book, where we learned about
promoting cooperation among employees. First, we need to set
up internal communication tools to encourage information
exchange between employees. Second, it is crucial to disclose
information from all departments and put company operations
under the light. Finally, we must reduce competition within the
company and build a pleasant atmosphere of cooperation.
Conclusion
We have now reached the end of our book of Always Day One:
How the Tech Titans Plan to Stay on Top Forever.
The book explores the secrets of the Big Tech giants —
Amazon, Meta (Facebook), Google, Apple, and Microsoft — by
examining their respective business cultures. In conclusion, the
companies that consistently launch new products and prosper are
the ones that encourage their employees to express opinions and
actively contribute their wisdom and talents to the company.
Furthermore, leaders need to listen to their employees to have
the entire company engage in innovation. At the same time,
information across different departments should also be
transparent. That way, employees can clearly understand the
company's operations and the division of labor. It is also a great
idea to build software for internal communications for the
workers to collaborate across diverse groups.
Creating an innovative company culture and maintaining the
"Always Day One" mentality can help a company resist
complacency and short-sightedness about its current
achievements in order to stay one step ahead of the competition.
