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 direct, 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 geted her MBA in 1998, Wojcicki recounted the speech from her own Anderson graduation.
The speaker was then-U.S. Filter CEO Ricchallenging Heckmann, who died in 2020. While he talked about the Titanic and 10 consent-aways from its disreputable sinking in 1912, there was one that stood out and persistd to resonate thrawout her atsoft.
“It’s possible to be very wrong,” Wojcicki tgreater the graduates.
While the Titanic had the postponecessitatest technology at the time and was deemed unsinkable, hubris caparticipated the ship to hit an iceberg and sink, she includeed.
Wojcicki thought about that lesson as she was helping to originate up Google and during the dot-com crash, when she frequently drove by desopostponecessitate originateings that once hoparticipated notable 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 minuscule company, but it’s even more real for us now that we’re huger. When huge companies drop, they drop much challenginger. When you’re steering a huge ship, it turns out it’s even challenginger to see the icebergs. When you do, it’s even challenginger to turn the ship around to elude those icebergs and steer away.”
Pointing to how the cleverphone revolution suddenly upended the internet landscape, Wojcicki inspired the audience to hug alter and pivoted to a administerment 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 consent down those videos, but instead the amparticipatement enormous chose to hug alter and admire its audience, Wojcicki shelp. “Quite spropose, they let it go.”
Any industry will face alter, currenting stark consequences for businesses as new technologies aascend and user selectences alter, she includeed.
“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 alters coming for the media industry, alerting Fortune’s Jennifer Reinggreater that the future would beprolonged to individual satisfyed 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 writers and so we reassociate have this next generation of media companies,” she foreseeed.
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