Abstract
Eric Schmidt was born in 1955 in
Before taking the positions of Chairman and CEO at Google in 2001, Eric Schmidt served 14 years at Sun as various technical positions, 5 years at Novell as Chairman and CEO. Schmidt also served on Apple's board from 2006 to 2009.
There are two guidelines that led to Eric Schmidt's successes. The first guideline considers human asset as priceless property. The second one is his desire to be an organization builder.
Throughout his leadership, Eric Schmidt mainly uses the supporting leadership style. Though his strengths such as setting high expectation and self-improvement have made him a successful leader, the inflexibility in using leadership styles and the reliance on individual talent have been his weaknesses.
Brief Analysis of Schmidt’s Background, Training, and Education
Eric Schmidt was born in 1955 in Washington D.C,
From 1965 to 1970, Schmidt and his family lived in
In 1972, Schmidt entered
In 1976, after leaving Princeton, Schmidt moved to North California and entered the
In 1982, Schmidt received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the
Summary of Accomplishments
In 1983, Eric Schmidt was hired as an Engineering Manager at Sun Microsystems. During his 14 years at Sun, Schmidt got a new job almost every 2 years and a half. In 1994, he became the Chief Technical Officer and started working on some projects that led to the Java initiative. However, the thing that he is proud of was not the Java initiative; it was his success in creating a great working environment.
In 1997, Eric Schmidt left Sun for Novell where he served as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. At that time, Novell was facing the declining fortunes and Schmidt was expected to help the company turn around. By restructuring the organization and leveraging the company's current resources, Schmidt really helped make a turnaround within nine months. In late 1999 and early 2000, Schmidt conducted another reorganization to improve Novell's marketing strategies. However, this reorganization did not help the situation and Novell was merged with Cambridge Technology Partners a year later.
In March 2001, Schmidt was appointed chairman of Google's board of directors. About five months later, he was made the new Chief Executive Officer of this company. In addition to maintaining the innovative culture of Google which made Google the world largest web-search engine, Schmidt helped Google go public successfully in 2004 despite many observers' worry about the viability of the company after the event of IPO. The great partnership between Schmidt and the two founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, has helped Google expand to other markets such as mobile OS, mobile search, mobile advertising…
In addition to the most important positions at Google, Schmidt also served on Apple's board of directors from 2006 to 2009. In 2009, because of the pressure from increasing competition between Apple and Google, Eric Schmidt resigned from Apple's board to focus on his job at Google.
Leadership Profile and Style
Valuing human asset is the most important characteristic that we can see in Schmidt's leadership. He always refers to human asset when talking about his successes. At Sun, Schmidt said that the thing he was most proud of was the people that he hired although he was known for his contribution to help make Java become ubiquitous for the internet. He emphasized "But without the people in the high tech industry, you're nothing". In his opinion, his smart people and the good working environment that he established made up success. When Schmidt talked about the story of his success at Novell, he said "I had an asset, it was human asset". For him, the people at Novell, who wanted to win, actually drove the company's success. In an interview in 2008, when Schmidt was asked about the way he managed the innovation at Google, he emphasized that "You have to have a set of necessary conditions for innovation to occur. To start with, you have to listen to people". Apparently, from Schmidt's perspective, human asset is always at the center of the focus.
Schmidt's desire to be an organization builder is also a crucial component of his successful leadership. This philosophy is quite far from his technical background. It actually derives from his appreciation of human asset. It also reflects his desire to lead. During his first job at Sun as an engineering manger, he built his team by from the very beginning. Finally, he could be proud that he had "built certainly one of the greatest collections of people". In 1997, when he left Sun for Novell, he continued his philosophy by restructuring Novell's organization to help it made a turnaround. As a result of this restructuring, thousands of employees were laid off, five executives resigned and an entire marketing team of 60 employees went. At Google, Schmidt's viewpoint is that people will work great as long as they do not undercut each other. This viewpoint is the explanation for his great partnership with the two Google's founders. It also supports the shared leadership model which is now in use at Google.
Definitely, the two characteristics of Eric Schmidt's leadership, as discussed above, reveal that Schmidt has a supporting leadership style. When he was asked about how he controlled the innovation at Google, he answered "The word 'control' is not such a strong word at Google". This answer evidently implies that he does not use the command-and-control style. In an interview with the Washington Post, Schmidt said "Google is run by its culture and not by me". Additionally, one of his recommendations for managing the geeks was "you can tell them what to do, but you can't tell them how to do it". He added "make sure that they're happy and that they have everything they need to do their job". Definitely, Schmidt tends use supporting leadership to help maximize people capability and creativity.
Character Profile
Strengths
Among the leadership attributes, creating high expectation is one of the strengths that brought about Schmidt's success. Even when he had no engineering management experience, he expected that he would be a prefect engineering manager at Sun. Of course, he did better than that and became Chief Technology Officer of the company. In order to get new ideas into his company, his rule was that "you go in this, and you come out in 12 month, and please come out with something interesting". One of his needs was to try something new. This was also the reason why he left Sun for Novell. "There was something big there. So I started working on that", he explained. Obviously, serving as a CEO was more difficult than working as a CTO. Moreover, Novell at that time was facing difficulties but Schmidt was confident that he would make it turn around. With high expectations, Schmidt took a big step to become one of the legendary leaders.
Self-improvement must be one of the strengths having great contributions to Schmidt's leadership. He decided to enter
Weaknesses
An outstanding weakness of Schmidt is his limited flexibility in using leadership styles. As analyzed above, supporting leadership is the key style that Schmidt has used throughout his leadership positions. Because this style is suitable only for people at the Capable but Cautious Performer stage with high competence and variable commitment, it will not be such ineffective when used to lead people at other stages of leadership development with different levels of competence and commitment. The situation at Novell after Schmidt took his CEO position should be an example. There must have been problems related to Schmidt's leadership when five executives and an entire marking team of 60 peoples resigned. Although Schmidt could have a feeling that he had trustful people after that restructuring, the merger of Novell thereafter showed that his style had not been as successful as expected.
Another weakness would be his reliance on individual innovation. Although he said that the nature of innovation and creativity comes from both "one brilliant guy" and "a team", he believes the small team or little group is much better than big group. He claimed "The productivity of any project is inversely proportional to the size of the project team" and explained "On a large team, the contributions of the best people are always smaller, and overall productivity is always lower". While this is clearly an effective approach to implement small projects and to start an initiative, it may fuel the rise of elitism in the organization and the elitism, in its turn, will harm the cohesiveness of the organization in a global partnership model context.
Evaluation of Schmidt in a Global Partnership Model Context
With all experiences obtained during his leadership, it is clear that Eric Schmidt is effectively using the global partnership model to manage his company. At Google, the bottom-up process of idea generation has been used a long time ago and has become the corporate culture. Eric Schmidt also confirmed that "Google is probably the best example of a network-based organization. Very flat, very non-hierarchical, very much informal in culture and ideas – ideas come from everywhere". Although Schmidt agrees that it is quite unusual, this practice shows that he and his company are now on the way to fit in a global partnership model.
Reference:
Blanchard, K. (2003). Leadership partnering for performance. In Segil, L., Goldsmith, M. & Belasco, J. (Eds), Partnering: The New Face of Leadership. Retrieved from http://msbcollege.skillport.com
BusinessWeek (2008, April 29). How Google Fuels Its Idea Factory. Retrieved from: http://www.businessweek.com
BusinessWeek (2004, May 3). Online Extra: What Eric Schmidt Found at Google. Retrieved from: http://www.businessweek.com
Carlson, N. (2009, May 20). Google CEO Eric Schmidt: "We Don't Really Have A Five-Year Plan" (CLIP). Retrieved from: http://www.businessinsider.com
Eric Schmidt. Newsmakers, Issue 4. Gale Group, 2002. Reproduced in
Mitchell, R. (2007, December 19). How to Manage Geeks. Retrieved from: http://www.fastcompany.com
Morrow, S. D. (2000, January 18). Transcript of a Video History Interview with Eric Schmidt. Retrieved from: http://www.cwhonors.org
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