Alberto Savoia was Google’s first engineering director and is currently Innovation Agitator Emeritus, where, among other things, he led the development and launch of the original Google AdWords. He is the author of The Right It: Why So Many Ideas Fail and How to Make Sure Yours Succeed, a book that provides critical advice for rethinking how we launch a new idea, product, or business, and gives insights to help successfully beat the law of market failure: that most new products will fail, even if competently executed. He is a successful serial entrepreneur, angel-investor and an expert practitioner in pretotyping and lean innovation. He is based in Silicon Valley where he teaches his uniquely effective approach to innovation at Google, Stanford. He has also taught and coached many Fortune 500 companies, including Nike, McDonald’s, and Walmart, as well as the US Army.

At this very moment, millions of people around the world are working hard to bring to life new ideas that, when launched, will be successful. Some of these ideas will turn out to be stunning successes that will have a major impact on our world and our culture: the next Google, the next polio vaccine, the next Harry Potter series, the next Red Cross, the next Ford Mustang. Others will be smaller, more personal, but no less meaningful successes: a little restaurant that becomes a neighborhood favorite, a biography that does not make the bestseller list but tells an important story, a local nonprofit that cares for abandoned pets.

At this very same moment, many other people are working equally hard to develop new ideas that, when launched, will fail. Some of them will fail spectacularly and publicly: like New Coke, the movie John Carter, or the Ford Edsel. Others will be smaller, more private, but no less painful failures: a home-based business that never takes off, a children’s book that neither publishers nor children have any interest in, a charity for a cause that too few people care enough about.

If you are currently working to develop a new idea, whether on your own or as part of a team, which group are you in? Or if at this moment you are still only thinking about investing to develop a new idea, which group will you be in?

Most people believe that they either are or will be in the first group—the group whose ideas will be successful. All they have to do is work hard and execute well. Unfortunately, we know that this cannot be the case. Most new products, services, businesses, and initiatives will fail soon after they are launched—regardless of how promising they sound, how much their developers commit to them, or how well they execute them.

This is a hard fact to accept. We believe that other people fail, because they don’t know what they are doing. They are losers who have no business being in that business. Somehow, we believe that this does not apply to us and to our idea—especially if we’ve experienced victories in the past: I am a winner. I was successful before. I will be successful again—just watch me!

That is how I used to think. And I believed I had good reasons for my smugness, because I had experienced a string of successes with only a few relatively minor setbacks. Failure was something that only affected other people.

And then, just as I had reached new heights of confidence and hubris, the Beast of Failure wrapped its tentacles around me and bit me in the ass. A good, hard-to-ignore, and impossible-to-forget bite on that smart, competent, and well-prepared ass of mine.

I could lick my wounds or bite back. I decided to bite back.

Failure became my nemesis. Defeating it, my obsession. Teaching others how to defeat it, my mission.

– Alberto Savoia, The Right It:
Why So Many Ideas Fail and How to Make Sure Yours Succeed

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

You implemented the Google ads, and that's a huge market experiment. I don't know what you can reveal about it, but what were important elements that you included in that design process?

ALBERTO SAVOIA

So, as much as I would love to take the credit, Google Ads was a big team, and I was fortunate to be brought in as a director that managed the team. And I would also like to say the idea of attaching ads to searches, anybody could have had it. In fact, it was the most obvious thing. Just like on television, if you watch a car race, then it makes sense to have ads about cars. So I think the reason it was so successful is because innovations and new ideas, they compound. They build one upon the other. So the reason why ads was so successful for Google is because search was so successful for Google. So when you have search and you have billions of people coming in every day, maybe every hour, and searching all kinds of things, you have this treasure trove of data. And more importantly, guess what? If you have billion searches per day, you know, how many experiments can you run? Countless, right? And so Google is very famous for doing a lot of A/B experiments. That's how we collect the data. You think, if we make the ads, let's say short and long, they will be more effective than if we make them, tall and long.

Well, how do we know which one will work better? You can do a lot of experiments. So what actually enabled Google to be so successful and to grow is this mental attitude, which by the way, is the same one that Amazon and some of these really successful technology companies have, of doing a lot of experiments on small samples and continually refining their data based on that.

If you're dealing with a lot of people, you can do those experiments and that's why these companies are successful. The sad thing or what happens with companies that do not operate in that way, that do not try to operate on data and do all of those experiments, those are the ones that are left behind. Innovation is experimentation.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

And when one has so many ideas and you're really in the hotbed of so many rooms with creative people deciding what ideas to pursue. Let's say you're so fortunate to have fairly reasonable access to raising finance. So when you have those kinds of competing ideas, what has been your and your team's selection process of selecting those ideas which you think will be the most successful, but also maybe also contribute to solving important problems or issues?

SAVOIA

So you have to know your values, your mission, and if you use that as a guiding light, usually you end up going in the right direction. Now, if you take money from other people, if you're a venture capitalist, or even if you go on Kickstarter and people give you money to build something, then you have to commit to building it.

But there is another scenario, and I do mention it in the book in a short paragraph where sometimes - and you as an artist know, and I've seen your work, you like to make films - sometimes you just want to do something, and you do not care.

So it is very important at the beginning to be clear about what your objectives are and your definition of success. So I put on YouTube a series called The Math of Success. I have a very clear definition of success, and that is actual results are better or equal to expected results. So if you want to do a documentary because it tells an important story, your mission, your actual result is to have a well-made documentary that tells a story accurately and reaches certain people. So if you set the expectations right at the beginning, it becomes very easy to determine which project to choose.

*

*

But then what is the next problem? The challenge is not coming up with new technology, right? The challenge is how do we humans adapt to this technology, and put it to a good use? And, right now, so I've gone from hardware and software, Right now I'm most interested in what some people call wetware. How our brain works because all of these ideas that you see behind me on the screen, where do they come up from? They come up from my head. And if you look at how your thought process is working, sometimes they just seem to pop up, right?

Especially these days. I think what all this technology has shown us, especially with the pandemic, Twitter, Facebook, I don't think it's so much that the technology has changed us, more that it kind of reveals what's going on in our mind. And basically, I cannot think of any single thing that anybody could write that you don't get all kinds of feedback. Great idea. Terrible idea. So like Galileo with the telescope, it kind of allows us to see into our collective mind.

You know, I'm all about facing the reality. This is really how some people think. And why do people think some ways it's because some of their experiences led them to think that way. And so if you have two people with very different experiences, they're going to have different conclusions. And as we've seen, trying to merge them is very difficult. And I think that's the biggest challenge. And if we're not clear in our mind, if we're really biased, we fall in love, right? We don't just fall in love with our idea. We fall in love with our beliefs, with our convictions. This is important. We think: this person is good, this person is bad, and then becomes very, very hard to have an argument. 

Some days it's very illuminating because finally we have the data in front of us. You could not cure infectious diseases until you had the microscope, until you could actually see, Oh, this is what's happening at the cellular level. So similarly, I think what the tools that we have developed for communicating with each other have given us is an ability to look at what is actually happening. What is inside our minds.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk and Kajsa Kedefors with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this episode was Kajsa Kedefors. Digital Media Coordinators are Jacob A. Preisler and Megan Hegenbarth. 

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).