Workplace Multiplier by Tola Akinsulire

Tuesday Edition: January 7, 2025

Welcome to the Workplace Multiplier newsletter. Published every Tuesday & Friday, we discover something crucial to help us on the way to winning at work and in life.

My New Year Message

I'd like to let you into something.

On January 2nd, I sent a New Year Message to my team.

The message was my way of laying the groundwork for how we were going to define our year.

I'd like to share the message with you.

I hope it inspires you.

Ps: "A-Team" is the nickname that all the teams I lead agreed to call themselves.

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Hello A-Team,

Happy New Year.

There is always a new sense of optimism that heralds the beginning of a new period or hitting a new milestone…a new quarter, a marriage, a new journey as a parent with the first child… and you can add many more to the mix.

The most common period that everyone experiences at the same time is the start of a new year.

I share the same optimism with you that this new year will be a wonderful one.

I also share an additional sense of optimism for you. This year, you will experience the biggest level of growth as a professional in your career.

What will mark you out for this?

It’s simply this - your ability to solve bigger problems.

Yes, life rewards you based on the size of the problems you can solve.

And I know you can solve bigger problems than the ones you solved last year.

But I am not just going forward into the new year with fathom optimism. No, I am going to do more than that.

I am going to demand more from you and push you further because I know you can be better.

You can solve bigger problems.

I expect this from you.

So, what can you expect from me?

You can expect three things from me.

First, I will support you as much as I can with the tools and resources you need to solve the bigger problems.

Second, I will offer you access to leverage relationships I have which can help you solve the bigger problems.

Third, I will provide guidance when you need clarity in defining the bigger problems you want to solve.

One of the stories from the early days of Google gives a picture of the capacity I believe exists in our team.

One Friday afternoon in 2002, long before Google became a household verb, Larry Page (one of the founders) walked into the office kitchen and posted some printouts of results from Google’s AdWords engine. On top, in big bold letters, he wrote, “THESE ADS SUCK.”

He had been playing around on the Google site, typing in search terms and seeing what sort of results he'd get.

A search for the motorbike Kawasaki H1B yielded lots of ads for lawyers specialising in H-1B US visas. Which meant that Google users were being bombarded with lots of unrelated information.

And so he printed some of these out, wrote his feelings across them, pinned them on the whiteboard in Google’s kitchen and went home.

In most companies, this would be seen as cruel — an arrogant executive publicly humiliating his hapless employees for shoddy work — but not at Google. His unusual act was a show of confidence, defining a tough problem that he knew his talented engineers would want to solve.

Rather than yelling at the AdWords team, requesting a meeting, or firing someone, Page opted to post the results publicly, knowing that someone would immediately take care of the problem.

In their book, How Google Works, Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg describe what happened next. By early Monday morning, a group of engineers sent out an email with a solution that not only resolved the AdWords problem but helped transform Google into a major money machine.

The team proposed a new formula that took account of a page’s relevance rather than simply its budget.

They came up with an "ad relevance score." This became the foundation for Google's AdWords engine, a multi-billion-dollar business. The episode exemplifies how Google has built a culture that attacks problems — not people.

There is an additional kicker to the story that I found out later.

The team that fixed the problem wasn’t even on the ads team. They had just been in the office that Friday afternoon, saw Larry’s note, and understood that when your mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, then having ads (which are information) that suck (which isn’t useful) is a problem. So, they fixed it over the weekend.

This is the type of team I know we can be.

We solve bigger problems…we are committed to creating solutions.

This is what I want to see a lot of in this new year.

Yes, I am coming into this new year with optimism.

And Great Expectations.

I also hope you are too.

Once again, I wish you a wonderful 2025 ahead.

Regards

Tola

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Tola Akinsulire

I am a Workplace Multiplier.

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