AltaVista was the world’s most popular search engine by 1998. The site had recorded 80 million hits a day in 1997. Yahoo! Inc, via Overture, bought over AltaVista. AltaVista died and Yahoo! lived. Google came in and as of today Yahoo! is up for sale.
What does all this mean? AltaVista set up the multi threaded crawler – the ability to search more web pages than were believed to exist at that time. What happened to AltaVista’s drive and ambition to remain at the top? Why did Yahoo! take over and why is the same Yahoo! up for sale today?
Leadership of the fox kind is the key. There is no way that a fox can fight the lion – certainly not in the traditional sense of jaws and paws. It is only a dumb competitor who would fight the mighty with tools that yield a competitive advantage only to the mighty. The fox would challenge the “institutional skills” of the lion and instead rely on his “strategic resources”. This would necessarily include an opportunity where the lion displays a “weakness” and the inability to fight back.
The above allegory summarizes what happens when the young and the fresh challenge and take over those with power over them. Failure to focus on strategic leadership and its eventual result of strengthening the competition is well documented in business history.
The question then is what prompts one to take advantage and make better use of an opportunity while the mighty sit back and look on?
The motivation to supersede and win, despite the presence of market heavyweights, along with dissatisfaction with the status quo seems to be the basis of this leadership.
This attitude influences creative output as one is suddenly focused into the task at hand. There seems to be fireworks not just in our ability to concentrate but also in our capacity to take risks.
Motivated individuals are able to override programmed modes of thought in order to reflect critically and positively on the situation at hand. I am sure this also has a lot to do with the ability to find meaning in a task.
Google is the world’s number one search engine. Google became number one as the promoters were interested in a search engine that ranked websites in terms of importance and quantity of pages rather than the number of times the search items appeared on the page.
Google knew why they had to do it before they knew how they would do it. The entire motivation seems to stem from altering the status quo and creating new ways of handling resources.
To end the allegory –
a) The fox does not worry about claws and paws
b) The fox does not feel the need to fight the lion in the traditional sense
c) The lion is the king of the jungle and is fixed in his methods
Copyright © Nitesh Kotecha
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