Alberto Savoia - Google’s 1st Engineering Director - Author of “The Right It”

Alberto Savoia was Google’s first engineering director and is currently Innovation Agitator Emeritus, where, among other things, he led the development and launch of the original Google AdWords. He is the author of The Right It: Why So Many Ideas Fail and How to Make Sure Yours Succeed, a book that provides critical advice for rethinking how we launch a new idea, product, or business, and gives insights to help successfully beat the law of market failure: that most new products will fail, even if competently executed.

He is a successful serial entrepreneur, angel-investor and an expert practitioner in pretotyping and lean innovation. He is based in Silicon Valley where he teaches his uniquely effective approach to innovation at Google, Stanford. He has also taught and coached many Fortune 500 companies, including Nike, McDonald’s, and Walmart, as well as the US Army.

"I live in a community. It's about 170 homes, and we're all neighbors. We have a shared mailing list. And so I'm a big fan of this small experiment. You know if I need a 30-foot ladder to inspect my roof. I'm not going to go buy it to use it once. We have this circular economy and sharing. If I make too much food, I just post it and ask my neighbors, Hey, is anybody interested in this? So I think that on a small scale, I see it happening much more.

I'm lucky I work in a community where I've known my neighbors for a long time, but I can see why it would be more difficult in big cities or in places where people do not communicate. So how do you create these communities? Because once the community exists, it's just like a tool. Once you have the community, these behaviors actually happen naturally. And if you look at how human beings evolve as tribes, when there's a small number of people, there’s much more sharing. And people are much more careful with their actions. They want to share because then they can share back. So that is why I think the importance of doing things in a small experiment and then think, Okay, how do we scale it up in a large way? But you also have to start small and see if you can actually export it.”

www.albertosavoia.com
https://harperone.com/9780062884671/the-right-it

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