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| Source: Wikimedia |
Jessica Stillman writes on Inc.com this week about Dave Girouard, co-founder of Upstart and former president of Enterprise at Google. Stillman decribes how Girouard protects himself against complacency and over-confidence. She quotes Girouard: ""While I'm doing some things okay, I can be lulled into a place of feeling good about myself when I'm probably not doing some other things very well." Therefore, Girouard imagines that board has chosen to fire him and replace him with a truly spectacular chief executive. "What would she do differently than what I'm doing?" he asks himself. Then after identifying key actions that new CEO might undertake, he poses the question, "Why the hell aren't you doing those things?"
Girouard's mental exercise reminds me of the famous story about Andy Grove and Gordon Moore pondering the future of Intel's DRAM memory chip business in the early 1980s. In his terrific book, Only the Paranoid Survive, Grove wrote,
“I looked out the window at the Ferris wheel of the Great America amusement park revolving in the distance when I turned back to Gordon, and I asked, ‘If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what do you think he would do?’ Gordon answered without hesitation, ‘He would get us out of memory chips.’ I stared at him, numb, then said, ‘Why shouldn’t you and I walk out the door, come back, and do it ourselves?'”
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