While I have a feeling that Larry Page won’t take any of my suggestions (darn), I am happy to see him come out swinging hard.  What a welcome contrast to when Jerry Yang took over as CEO at Yahoo.  Several people have written that it is a bad idea to have a corporate wide bonus depending on the achievement of social goals.  I happen to disagree.  Social is pervasive and Google is behind, so in fact everyone in the company should be thinking about how they can contribute to fixing that.  It would be much harder (impossible? certainly impractical) to try to figure out ahead of time who can contribute and then just make their bonus depend on it.

But motivation only goes so far.  Even the most highly motivated sprinter will not do well at the long jump.  As it turns out, selection trumps motivation (at least over the relevant time scales).  For years Google has been selecting in its hiring for a certain set of skills and attitudes that fit well with solving search and related problems but are somewhat antithetical to social.  Robert Scoble puts this well in his post where he talks about time wasting.  Another post that I forgot to save to delicious compared it to the idea of “engineering” a better party.

So how does Google solve the selection problem quickly?  Through acquisition with subsequent independence.  Google did this successfully with Youtube and already has one social play with Slide.  One or two more bold moves here could quickly fix the problem.  Just like Google did not overpay for Youtube the math on these acquisitions should not be based on their standalone economics but rather their overall strategic importance for the company (and hence not left to the corp dev department).