With 10 Words, Google Head of Search Prabhakar Raghavan Just Taught a Profound Lesson About Success

Last month, Google senior vice president Prabhakar Raghavan called an all-hands meeting for the company's search employees to talk about the future. What he had to say was sobering, but he accompanied his message with a call-to-arms designed to inspire his employees to put in their best effort and face the future with optimism and determination. Whatever happens with Google search, his comments are a lesson in how to motivated the people who work for you to reach for success, even when dealing with recent failures.

What do you say to your team when your own errors, uncontrollable outside forces, or a combination of both leads to business results that weren't what you hoped for? You acknowedge the problem, regroup, and ask people to focus on the future. That's exactly what Raghavan did in two simple sentences: "I cannot tell you that all the stumbles are behind us. What matters is how we respond and what we learn."

What matters is how we respond and what we learn. It's a reminder we all need when failures hit, or market forces turn against us. Yes, things will go wrong, due to factors we can't control or our own mistakes--in Google's case there seems to be some of both. The most important question is what we do afterward, and whether we can use those failures as a way to start building future success. 

In this case, we're not talking about a business disaster, we're talking about slowing growth in search. But for Google, that's very much a cause for alarm. Search is, of course, Google's core product and one where it has dominated its market pretty much since the company's founding. That dominance, and the extraordinary growth of search, is part of what allowed Google to be the famously generous place to work it has traditionally been.

But times are changing. Search growth is slowing--perhaps because Google got more than 91 percent of the search market over the past decade and there's no longer much room for growth. On top of that, generative artificial intelligence is upending the very nature of search, providing results in narrative form. And Raghavan faces intense criticism from some outside the company both for ousting Google's longtime search leader Ben Gomes and for allegedly sacrificing the quality of search results in pursuit of increased ad revenue that may or may not even be possible.

All in all, the future growth of search, Google's formerly dependable cash cow now seems a bit murky. And that's exactly the message Raghavan delivered. Things have changed in the past couple of decades, he acknowledged. "It's not like life is going to be hunky-dory forever," he said in a recording of the event obtained by CNBC. "If there's a clear and present market reality, we need to twitch faster, like the athletes twitch faster."

He described the three months since the last all-hands meeting as "really high highs and low lows." But, at least from outside Google, the lows seemed to predominate. There was yet another round of layoffs, despite a solid quarterly report. Ad revenue was down, causing a drop in the company's stock price. And, most famously, the company released an AI image generating feature that it had to temporarily withdraw due to errors that apparently resulted from an attempt to build in racial sensitivity--a blunder that led to public apologies from both Raghavan and CEO Sundar Pichai.

Raghavan praised the AI team who he said worked 120 hours a week and managed to fix most of the image-generating problems in just 10 days. But then he warned that fighting the AI wars with rivals like Microsoft necessarily meant investing heavily in hardware to provide the expanded computing power AI requires. "We're in a new cost reality," he said. 

And on the revenue side, he said, the growth of new devices coming online, and thus new search customers, was slowing. "What that means is our growth in this new operating reality has to be hard earned," he said.

Will Raghavan's speech really be enough to change things for Google search? Only time will tell. But it was an inspiring, if distressing message, designed to inspire his team to try harder and beat some difficult odds. Whether it works or not, it's a great model to follow when tough times come calling for your own company.