the rebuke is that lack of chaos makes people feel more orderly and as if things are going better, but it doesn't increase your luck surface area, it just maximizes cozy vibes and self interested comfort.
My dynamic range of professional experience is high, dropout => waiter => found startup => acquirer => Google.
You're making an interesting point that I somewhat agree with from the perspective of someone was...clearly a little more feral than his surroundings in Google, and wildly succeeded and ultimately quietly failed because of it.
The important bit is "great man" theory doesn't solve lack of dynamism. It usually makes things worse. The people you read about in newspapers are pretty much as smart as you, for better or worse.
I actually disagreed with the Sergey thing along the same lines, it was being used as a parable for why it was okay to do ~nothing in year 3 and continue avoiding what we were supposed to ship in year 1, because only VPs outside my org and the design section in my org would care.
Not sure if all that rhymes or will make any sense to you at all. But I deeply respect the point you are communicating, and also mean to communicate that there's another just as strong lesson: one person isn't bright enough to pull that off, and the important bit there isn't "oh, he isn't special", it's that it makes you even more careful building organizations that maintain dynamism and creativity.
Yeah people seem to be pretty poor at judging the impact of 'key' people.
E.g. Steve Jobs was absolutely fundamental to the turn around of Apple. Will Brin have this level of incremental impact on the Goog/Alphabet of today? Nah.
The difference is: Apple had one "key person", Jobs, and yes the products he drove made the company successful. Now Jobs has gone I haven't seen anything new.
But if you look at Google, there isn't one key product. There are a whole pile of products that are best in class. Search (cringe, I know it's popular here to say Google search sucks and perhaps it does, but what search engine is far better?), YouTube, Maps, Android, Waymo, GMail, Deep Mind, the cloud infrastructure, translate, lens (OCR) and probably a lot of others I've forgotten. Don't forget Sheets and Docs, which while they have been replicated by Microsoft and others now were first done by Google. Some of them, like Maps, seem to have swapped entire teams - yet continued to be best in class. Predicting Google won't be at the forefront on the next advance seems perilous.
Maybe these products have key people as you call them, but the magic in Alphabet doesn't seem to be them. The magic seems to be Alphabet has some way to create / acquire these keep people. Or perhaps Alphabet just knows how to create top engineering teams that keep rolling along, even when the team members are replaced.
Apple produced one key person, Jobs. Alphabet seems to be a factory creating lots of key people moving products along. But as Google even manages to replace these key people (as they did for Maps) and still keep the product moving, I'm not sure they are the key to Googles success.
In Assistant having higher-ups spitting ideas and random thoughts ended up in people mistakenly assume that we really wanted to go/do that, meaning that chaos resulted in ill and cancelled projects.
The worst part was figuring what happened way too late. People were having trying to go for promo for a project that didn't launch. Many people got angry, some left, the product felt stale and leadership&management lost trust.
Isn’t that what the parent is describing? “Ill and cancelled projects” <==> “luck surface area”, and “trying to go for promotion” <==> “cozy vibes and self-interested comfort”?
