Larry Page: A pilot at the helm of tomorrow
Posted on Sep 4, 2015
Born in 1973 to a family of pioneering computer scientists, from the earliest age Larry Page was not only surrounded by the burgeoning field of information technology, but also a nurturing and stimulating home which, according to writer Nicholas Carlson, “fostered creativity and invention,” inextinguishable driving forces with which Page would proceed to change the world.
Perhaps discovery has always been in Page’s DNA. Creatively oriented in his youth, playing the saxophone and studying music composition, he later stated that in studying music, “you are ever cognizant of time.” Beginning school in a Montessori environment, Page’s creativity was further encouraged. He was first in his elementary class to hand in assignments on a word processor, and ever encouraged by his brother to dissect and disseminate objects to see how they worked. This inventive spirit soon gave rise to an entrepreneurial spirit. As Page acknowledged to writer Virginia Scott, “by age 12, I knew I was going to start a company eventually.”
While in the University of Michigan Larry Page bubbled with innovation. To brush the surface: he made inkjet printers out of Legos, proposed an on-campus monorail to ease transit, and participated in the development of solar car technology as part of the University’s “Solar Car Team.” Our collective future, however, was truly annealed when Page, while pursuing his PhD in Stanford, considered the mathematical properties of the world wide web as his dissertation topic. Sergey Brin, who would prove to be an equal player in the Google story, soon joined his research team, finding the topic quite interesting, and in 1998 the two co-authored the ground-breaking paper: “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.”
To Page and Brin’s capable and creative minds, this field of pursuit represented the forefront of a dawning age. Today we all realize the result of their innovation in a search engine capable of upwards of 2 trillion searches per day. This represents the culmination of Page and Brin’s years of hard work, from dorm room to garage, and garage to warehouse packed with customized servers, as well as the labor of Google’s present 20,000 plus employees. From humble though ambitious beginnings to corporate offices, and micromanagement to an increasingly flexible management model, the success story continues. Larry Page’s true creativity lies in breaching the unknown, combining the yet unconnected, and streamlining the existing. These passions are noted in his management mottos: “don’t delegate (ideas);” “don’t get in the way if you’re not adding value;” and, “ideas are more important than age.”
After Google’s divestment in telecommunications (Android, Motorola), social media (Youtube), and more recently, in biotechnologies (Calico), Page’s mature approach to Google’s global positioning might best be noted in his question: “does it (technology) make your life better?”
Most people would agree that Page’s initiatives through Google have indeed made their lives better, and would likely show confidence in his future decisions in increasingly diverse fields of interest. Upon witnessing the invaluable results of puissant creative thinking, most of us will readily admit the validity of a statement, such as Page’s to Stephen Levy in Wired magazine in 2013, “If you’re not doing some things that are crazy, you’re doing the wrong things,” or his comment during a keynote address at the May 2013 I/O developers conference, that Google should “be building great things that don’t exist.”
Launching into biotechnology and alternative energy sectors for social and business ventures, and most recently into the overarching Alphabet Inc., which will oversee multiple mega-operations of Google’s divestitures, Page is actively, in his own words, scanning the future for opportunities to “improve millions of lives,” while building his business. And taking the broader path of a small handful of other multinational pioneers, such as Elon Musk and Bill Gates, we see Page demonstrating a combination of creative entrepreneurial intuition with social responsibility, thereby painting an optimistic picture for a sustainable future.
We can thus expect the unexpected from Page in the near future, in an effort to create roads and bridges where none yet exist and others least expect, and once implemented, these will likely prove indispensible to us all.
Mark Amiama
Photo: © Google
This article is dedicated to our fortnightly newsletter “Leaders Wisdom Journal”. To Subscribe.
Other articles of the same issue:
Jiang Qiong Er (Shang Xia): “Business success is more a reward than an objective!”
A Simple but Powerful Formula for Leadership Success
The creativity and creations that led to the Pritzker Prize
Itay Talgam: Lead like the great conductors (TED Video)