So there’s a former military officer who tells the story about his career. He was worried a little bit about promotions. Is he getting promoted fast enough. His career, right? And one day he just woke up and changed and he said,

“I’m not going to take care of my career anymore. I’m going to take care of my people. And the moment I did that, everything changed because they wouldn’t let me fail.” – Lloyd Austin III

Mr. Austin retired from the Army as a four star general and was sworn in as the 28th Secretary of Defense on January 22, 2021.

Take care of your people and they won’t let you fail. To that end, Forbes published an article on the impact that managers have on the mental health of their employees.

New data suggests that for almost 70% of people, their manager has more impact on their mental health than their therapist or their doctor—and it’s equal to the impact of their partner.

https://www.ukg.com/resources/article/mental-health-work-managers-and-money

Here’s a random thought: Why don’t more companies don’t have a Chief Medical Officer?

Random thoughts on the future of “Search”:

If I were on the board at Alphabet, I would immediately bring back Larry Page and Sergei Brin as CEO and President of Google. Remember that scene in The Godfather where Michael informs the family’s longtime consigliere Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall) that he is “out” as consigliere? Michael says to him, “You’re not a wartime consigliere, Tom”. The thing is, whether they realize it or not, Google is at war.

Two weeks ago in an interview with FT, Satya Nadella said the following: “From now on, the [gross margin] of search is going to drop forever. There is such margin in search, which for us is incremental. For Google it’s not, they have to defend it all.” I don’t know where you grew up, but where I come from, those are fightin words. I’m just reading between the lines, but it sounds like Nadella is willing to do whatever it takes to win Search AND, in doing so, take down Google Workspace & Google Cloud – rivals to Office and Azure respectively. IMO, Nadella wants it all back and he’s going to make Google defend every square pixel of search.

One more thing: I predict MSFT will convince Apple to switch the default search engine on iOS from Google to Bing. Why? Because the ghost of Steve Jobs still walks the halls of Apple, and some grudges never die.

At least one of you reading this is thinking “I’ve never seen The Godfather”. You need to fix that immediately!!!

Finally, to whom it may concern, I’d be happy to join the board at Alphabet. I know things, I never lose at bar trivia, and I’m a lot of fun at parties. 🙃