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Ten years ago, Susan Wojcicki drew on an historical example of epic failure and a more recent example of smashing success for key lessons in leadership.<\/p>\n
The former YouTube CEO passed away on Friday<\/a>\u00a0after two years of living with lung cancer. A Silicon Valley pioneer, she spent more than two decades leading various parts of\u00a0Google<\/a>\u00a0and its parent company Alphabet. <\/p>\n At the 2014 commencement ceremony<\/a> for the UCLA Anderson School of Management, where she earned her MBA in 1998, Wojcicki recounted the speech from her own Anderson graduation.<\/p>\n The speaker was then-U.S. Filter CEO Richard Heckmann, who died in 2020<\/a>. While he talked about the Titanic and 10 take-aways from its infamous sinking in 1912, there was one that stood out and continued to resonate throughout her career.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s possible to be very wrong,\u201d Wojcicki told the graduates.<\/p>\n While the Titanic had the latest technology at the time and was deemed unsinkable, hubris caused the ship to hit an iceberg and sink, she added. <\/p>\n Wojcicki thought about that lesson as she was helping to build up Google and during the dot-com crash, when she often drove by empty buildings that once housed prominent internet companies.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd I thought to myself, it\u2019s possible to be very wrong,\u201d she recalled. \u201cIt turns out that that was true for Google as a small company, but it\u2019s even more true for us now that we\u2019re larger. When big companies fall, they fall much harder. When you\u2019re steering a big ship, it turns out it\u2019s even harder to see the icebergs. When you do, it\u2019s even harder to turn the ship around to avoid those icebergs and steer away.\u201d<\/p>\n Pointing to how the smartphone revolution suddenly upended the internet landscape, Wojcicki urged the audience to embrace change and pivoted to a management lesson from the 2013 Disney movie Frozen<\/em>.<\/p>\n A key factor in its success was that Disney embraced YouTube, she explained. After it hit theaters, fans began uploading their own covers of the movie\u2019s signature song \u201cLet It Go\u201d to YouTube.<\/p>\n Disney could have easily asked the platform to take down those videos, but instead the entertainment giant chose to embrace change and respect its audience, Wojcicki said. \u201cQuite simply, they let it go.\u201d<\/p>\n Any industry will face change, presenting stark consequences for businesses as new technologies emerge and consumer preferences change, she added. <\/p>\n \u201cIt feels unusual, our instinct is to fight it. Be we need to embrace it. We need to let it go,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n In 2016, Wojcicki was prescient in seeing changes coming for the media industry, telling Fortune\u2019s<\/em> Jennifer Reingold<\/a>\u00a0that the future would belong to individual content creators<\/a> who had the power to amass audiences on YouTube.<\/p>\n \u201cThey are their own media companies. They are the CEO, they are the personality, and then behind them as they get bigger they have production and editors and writers and so we really have this next generation of media companies,\u201d she predicted.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n CEO Daily provides key context for the news leaders need to know from across the world of business. Every weekday morning, more than 125,000 readers trust CEO Daily for insights about\u2013and from inside\u2013the C-suite. Subscribe Now<\/a>.<\/div>\nRecommended Newsletter:<\/strong><\/p>\n