From 1999 to 2005, Doug Edwards was was director of consumer marketing and brand management for Google. He is the author of I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee[…]
Sign up for the Smarter Faster newsletter
A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people
From 1999-2005 Doug Edwards was the Director of Brand Management for Google. He says that a radical change of environment can refresh your perspective and create opportunity.
I think you need to put yourself in an opportunity-rich environment, and if you tend to stay in one place for a very long time you know where the opportunities are, you can cultivate them, and you can work in an incremental way towards realizing them. Whereas, if you put yourself in a completely new situation where you’re not as comfortable and you really have to engage everything with a new perspective, I think that creates more opportunity for you.
it was clear to me that the Internet was going to be the next medium, and I wanted to find a way to become directly involved in that. And it wasn’t so much that Google struck me as the singular opportunity that I needed to pursue . . . I really believed that they would be out of business within a year, just because a lot of startups failed, most startups fail.
I had enough confidence that I could go back to a traditional media company and take my experience and become their in-house Internet expert. So I wasn’t too worried that Google would go out of business. The problem is Google never went out of business. They just kept racking up success after success. So there never came a point where I said “oh well, now’s the time for me to leave because they’re clearly going to fail.”
I really didn’t have a lot of time to think about it because I was so busy every day with new challenges and I was so engaged in what I was doing that it never really occurred to me, I don’t think at any point during the time I was at Google, that I should think about another job.
▸
2 min
—
with
