Sometimes you know why people are where they are and that’s well deserved. Take Larry Page, Google’s Co-Founder who gave a talk in February this year. As Larry being a PhD-droptout from Stanford University, his traits are very much that of a scientiest which you feel across the entire speech. If you got an hour and eight minutes, skip the daily soap and check this out:
Larry Page as the Übernerd is certainly not as a compeliing speaker as for instance Bill Clinton, yet what he has to say is pretty powerful. He talks about how Google as a company basically evolved by accident from a scientific project and how this could serve as an example for many other areas. What was critical in his view is to combine scientific excellence with entrepreneurial zest, business acumen and marketing focus. He moved on to talk about lots of problems that could and should be worked on from a scientific perspective in order to then build scale in the marketplace. One of his personal issues of interest is obviously climate change and green energy. He quotes his “favourite statistic” on the solar power that goes down per year in the desert of Nevada per quare mile - more or less the area that a nuclear power occupies. And it turns out that basically the amount of energy delivered as solar heat from the former equals that of nuclear heat from the latter.
Interesting also to follow Larry in order to get into the mindset how Google as an organization works on specifically defined problems: with small teams of around 10 people, with the experience to deliver the best results. During the Q&A session a lady from the audience wants to know how applied science could help building jobs. In a polite way, Larry defies the inner logic of the question by retorting “building jobs is not the key metric we should look at”. Rather he suggests, we should imagine a state of happyness in which we strive to live and subsequently build our capabilities around it. As an example he mentions that there were hardly any more jobs in U.S.-agriculture compared to a few decades ago, “and we still have enough to eat.” Indeed, that’s the best pleading for relentless structural reform through innovation propelled by a higher cause.
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