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Leaders Create the Ability to Innovate
How Bill Coughran led the infrastructure group
Coughran naturally led his group in the deliberately loose way then
encouraged by the founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. His nearly one
hundred direct reports frankly made it virtually impossible to lead any
other way. “Google always had a very bottom-up culture,” he said, “and
I wanted to nurture this.” He gave as much freedom as possible to his
engineers, “keeping the reins in enough so that we didn’t degenerate into
chaos.”
It was a style he had developed at Bell Labs where innovative, ambi-
tious engineering teams required a leader who could create a context for
them to get their work done, not to set a vision for ...