zmetro.com

Stopped into a west side post office this morning, expecting to stand in line….. Much to my pleasant surprise, they now have a slick self service kiosk where one can weigh a package, enter the destination zip code, pay with a debit/credit card and generate a label. Very slick and fast. (There was still a line, as most people opted for traditional service).

Eric Schmidt:

We allocate about 70% of our resources to our core business and 30% to “other” because we never know what that other will become. We also ask our employees to spend 20% of their time on exploration, and those tend to be complementary to our core.
Our agenda tends to be driven by a bottoms-up process not so much traditional strategic planning. Google is trying to solve the next problem not the last problem.
[ Question: Was it serendipity that made google what it became? ] I think the word is luck. The principles from which Google was built do exist in other indstries. Ours is a reproducable model, and others may end up reproducing it and solving other problems. We’re just seeing the beginning of this.
Good management is not that complicated, it’s about leadership. Some managers need to micromanage everything, but that doesn’t produce creativity. If you can figure out a way to tell a story, that’s how people learn. they have a beginning middle and an end. if you have the right kind of people and the right kind of values, that can work. The great thing about high tech is that labor is very mobile, and if you want to deal with other people, you are forced to deal with them as peers and equals.
There are many uses of the net that are not touched by Google. Peer to peer, and the majority of email traffic. It’s very important that people work on internet monitoring, internet scaling, all of the next generation projects — I don’t think any single one is of dominant importance.

Via Xeni