The Guru of Google
There’s some great lessons in this profile of Dr. Larry Brilliant, leader of google.org:http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/19968512/the_guru_of_google
Larry Brilliant, the man anointed by Google to give away hundreds of millions of dollars of the company’s money in the next few years, admits that he’s a deeply flawed human being. “I make a hundred mistakes a day,” he says. “I am, and have been, and will continue to be, wrong about almost everything.” When Brilliant speaks of his personal failures, he is not talking just about his late-1990s turn as the head of a couple of Silicon Valley companies that vaporized $100 million or so.
And he’s not talking just about his failure, which he knows was not his alone, to keep his friend Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead from killing himself with drugs and excess. He’s talking about deeper things, like the mismatch between what he wants to do for the world and what he can do for the world. He is talking about our tendency as human beings to be distracted by money, glamour, sex and personal glory.