Larry

"Larry and Sergey were good at listening to people who knew what they were talking about. I’m sure they argued with John, but they listened. They had never run a company or even worked in a company before. John came in and said, “This is a way you can run your business, and it’s measurable and trackable.” Measurables were intuitive to Larry and Sergey, and they had to be impressed by the fact that Intel used OKRs. Intel was such a great company, and we were so small by comparison."

"Larry was always good about upping the goals for the company OKRs. He used certain phrases that stuck with me. He wanted people at Google to be “uncomfortably excited.” He wanted us to have “a healthy disregard for the impossible.” I tried to do the same for the products team. It took courage to write an OKR that might well fail, but there was no other way if we wanted to be great. We deliberately set the bar for 20 million weekly active users by year’s end, knowing it was a formidable stretch—we were starting from zero, after all."

"When I ran OKRs for Larry, I sat in on four-hour meetings with his leadership team, where he’d debate all the company objectives and people were expected to be able to defend them and make sure they were clear. The guidance for OKRs at Google was often top-down, but with lots of discussion with experts on the team and significant give-and-take on key results: This is the direction we want to go, now tell us how you’re going to get there. Those long meetings enabled Larry to emphasize things he cared about, and also to vent frustrations, especially around service on our product OKRs. He’d say, “Tell me your speed now.” And then: “Why can’t you cut that in half?”"

"Our landmark OKR had some unanticipated consequences. Through the four-year push to reach the billion hours of daily watch time, our daily views soared in parallel. Stretch OKRs tend to set powerful forces into motion, and you can never be sure where they’ll lead. Another big lesson, for me, was the importance of support from the top—from Susan, of course, but also from Larry and Sergey."

"Bono: We had big goals for U2 from the start. (You could say megalomania set in from a very early age.) Edge was already an accomplished guitar player and Larry was a pretty good drummer, but I was a poor singer and Adam really couldn’t play the bass at all. But here’s what we thought: We’re not as good as those other groups. So we better be better."

"Conlee’s responsibilities and title were split between handset chief Thorsten Heins and manufacturing head Jim Rowan, both of whom he had groomed, leaving Lazaridis with two chief operating officers; a third, Morrison, still reported to Balsillie. Lazaridis’s direct reports, including software head David Yach and chief information officer Robin Bienfait, met regularly with Morrison to ensure they were on the same page, “but nobody could stand up and say ‘Okay, all opinions heard, this is the decision’” as Conlee had done, says a former senior executive. “It slowed the company down. It was not that people didn’t perform in their roles; it was just purely the structure that was established did not lead to good, sound, and convergent decision making.” With Conlee gone, inertia and frustration set in at the senior levels. “There wasn’t the individual accountability that we needed,” says Morrison. “It was too splayed because it was across three different organizations. Now, all of a sudden, Mike is trying to manage something, but he doesn’t have the genetic code Larry has.”"

"En route to New York, Marty Lipton called. He had just gotten off the phone with Larry, who said the board felt strongly that the chief financial officer and the general counsel should report to them instead of the CEO. “That’s outrageous, I’m not doing that,” I said. “You really have to,” he replied. Again, his mantra was: *Just get in, get control of the company, and worry about everything else later.*"

"At one point, a notice for customers was posted on the entrance wall with a joke added: “Seats are guided in the order of arrival, and even Steve Jobs will have to wait if there’s no reservation.” Larry, arriving earlier, keenly noticed it. Apparently, Larry told Steve, who arrived slightly later, about this, and afterward, they both burst out laughing."

"operated. In fact, their interest—both financial and intellectual—in other enterprises was beginning to win them invitations to serve as outside directors at other companies. Within a year of gaining control of Loew’s, for example, Larry would join the boards of Sun Chemical Co., Sterling Bank & Trust Co. of New York, and Fulton Industries, a collection of industrial concerns."

"For Larry, the destruction of Laurel-in-the-Pines was no cause for tears. Indeed, one of his strengths as a businessman was emotional de- tachment from investments. “You just don’t fall in love with your as- sets,” son Andrew said. That detachment allowed the Tisches to build equity fast. They traded hotel properties much the way a Wall Street money manager works the stock market. They bought or leased or built. They added value. They sold them. Sometimes they leased them back. “By the late 1960s, we had 13 hotels,” Andrew noted. In 1994, “we still have 13 hotels, though not all the same hotels. We leased them, sold back leases, managed them. Each deal has been a profitable deal unto itself. We never had to be somewhere. Even in the hotel business, we’ve just been trading assets.”"

"“We’ve had a great relationship,” Andrew Tisch said. “He always tells me exactly how he feels and vice versa. There are never long peri- ods of disagreement. I never once doubted what he was saying to me was in my best interest. After all is said and done, the most important thing in the world to Larry is his family. We can disagree on business practices and the like, but at the end of every conversation, he’ll say, ‘How are the kids?’”"

"As manager of the Tisches’ family and foundation money, Tommy frequently experienced his father’s strong tendency to be supportive, especially when the chips were down. “If a position is down, he en- courages you to trust your instincts and double the position,” he said, “and when things start running away on the upside, he’s less inclined to value that.” When Tommy’s bet on Boston bank stocks proved to be too early, “This is a major disaster,” he said. Larry’s response: “I came into the world poor. If I go out poor, what’s the difference?” Tommy was quick to remind his father that the same couldn’t be said for his sons."