Leading with Emotional Intelligence: Hands-On ... - always yours

40 LEADING WITH EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
SERGEY BRIN
Sergey Brin is one of the founders of Google, Inc. (along with
Larry Page). Google started in 1998 in a garage in Menlo Park,
California, 106 years after GE began. In August 2004 Google went
public in an unconventional initial public offering (IPO) at $85 and
raised $2 billion, which was the largest IPO ever. Google has been
on a hot streak. Its fortune went up $5.5 billion in 12 months. Google
was #4 of the World’s Most Admired Companies in 2009, and it was
#2 in 2010. 50
In reviewing Google’s meteoric rise, I wanted to examine what
EI competencies supported its huge success and chose to profi le
Sergey Brin to fi nd out more. Much of what is determined for him is
also true for Larry Page, and many of the EI competencies can be
inferred from the environment they created together at Google.
Brin and Page are both listed as #24 in the 2010 Forbes Magazine
featuring the richest people in the world, with a net worth of
$17.5 billion. They also made 1,000 of their now 6,000 employees
instant millionaires with their IPO. Brin and Page dropped out
of their Ph.D. programs in Computer Science at Stanford, in their
words, to “‘Change the world’ through a search engine that organizes
every bit of information on the Web for free.” 51 (Inspirational
Leadership)
When they first met, they found each other obnoxious. They
argued constantly about random issues, but this behavior soon
turned into an intellectual game with the goal of persuading each
other over to their viewpoint. Finally, they discovered common ground
when it came to solving one of computing’s biggest challenges—how
to retrieve relevant information from a massive set of data. Today,
they still debate in a shared office where they make most decisions
together. They also personally approve the hiring of nearly every
new employee. 52
Brin and Page’s vision for the future is: “The perfect search engine
would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly