Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, said he wanted to make the company 20 per cent more efficient. That could include layoffs as he braced for economic challenges and rapid hiring over the years.
At the Code conference in Los Angeles, Pichai shared more details about how he plans to make the company more efficient amid economic uncertainty and a broader slowdown in ad spending. Which has been Google’s biggest beneficiary by far.
“The more we try to understand macroeconomics, the more uncertain we become,” Pichai said on Tuesday. “Macroeconomic performance is related to advertising spending, consumer spending, and others,” he added.
While he said he saw macroeconomic factors beyond his control. Pichai acknowledged that companies had been “slowing down” as the workforce grew.
“We want to make sure that when you as a company have fewer resources than ever before. You prioritize the right things to do and your people are really productive, that they can really have an impact on things, on the work, that’s how we spend our time.”
Moderator Cara Swisher asked the CEO how he plans to make the company more efficient, pointing to the “Simplicity Sprint,” an internal project recently launched to realign a growing company and “deliver better results, faster,” such as which was first introduced in the report. On CNBC in July. While sales were still growing, tensions emerged after the company reported weaker-than-expected second-quarter revenue and sales.
But earlier in the year, employees had given company management very poor ratings of pay, promotions. And performance, citing the company’s growing bureaucracy, which executives acknowledged at the time.
“In everything we do, we can be slower at making decisions,” Pichai said Tuesday. “You look at it from start to finish and find out how you can make your business 20 percent more productive.”
Pichai also provides a more concrete example of how he hopes to do this. He gave an earlier instance of merging YouTube Music and Google Play Music into one product.
“Sometimes there are areas of progress [where] you have three people making decisions, understanding that, and if you reduce to two or one, efficiency increases by 20 percent,” he said in another example.