At our core, we are about connecting our members to opportunity, all kinds of opportunity.
That could be someone who is looking to start their career just out of college, it could be someone who, for whatever reason, is transitioning, someone that wants to do a better job at the job that they’re already in.
Given this knowledge economy that we live in, the digital economy, the rate of change, the rate of innovation is accelerating and it’s no longer enough to rest on the knowledge we acquired in school or earlier in our careers. It’s just a continuous process.
Lynda.com is really the best at what they do. They have the highest-quality catalog of learning materials that we saw in the industry, and for a whole host of reasons, really starting with the alignment between our vision, our mission, we thought it was a great choice.
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Photo by: TONY FLOREZ PHOTOGRAPHY
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We’ve long talked about a vision where we could create
economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce.
Where we had focused to date was essentially being able to map data with regard to skills, what skills you have and what skills you need to pursue an opportunity. With Lynda we now have the ability to help you acquire the skill.
Today we are at roughly 350 million members, and international expansion has been an important priority for us. And that’s not just introducing LinkedIn into new markets, but also starting to localize increasingly so we have the right market fit, depending on the market in question.
China would be a great example of this. We localized our efforts in February of last year. We had generated roughly 4 million members in China over a 10-year period, and over the last 12 months plus, that has grown from 4 million to 9 million members.
Facebook [is] a social network largely connecting friends and family, Twitter is about real-time communications and interests.
Snapchat is increasingly a media play that enables people to tell stories, not just one to one, one to few, one to many, but now curating stories from across that platform and working with partners like some of the leagues, some of the media companies.
I think you are seeing Facebook and Twitter all investing heavily in their content offerings. But that context is very different than LinkedIn. Our context exists solely to create value for professionals, to make them more productive and successful.
Leadership is about inspiring others to achieve shared objectives, and the most important word in there by far is inspire and this element of inspiration. That’s what I think separates leaders from managers. Managers tell people what to do, and leaders inspire them to do it.
I think inspiration emanates from an accommodation of three things. The first is the clarity of one’s vision and understanding of where that leader is trying to take the team and company, and the difference they are trying to make in the world.
I think the second is the courage of their convictions, because if it is true vision, it hasn’t been done before, there is going to be a lot of naysayers, and there’s going to be a lot of people who feel threatened and they are going to try to get in the way and convince you why you shouldn’t be doing it.
The third is the ability to effectively communicate both the clarity of your vision and that conviction. … It can be through word, it can be through deed, and ideally it is through both. But effective leaders are able to communicate really in a very strong way what it is that they are trying to accomplish.
Something that I continue to work on every day … [is] managing compassionately, which essentially means putting yourselves in the shoes of other people that you are working with day in and day out.
There is a whole host of reasons people may disagree and people may be in conflict, and I can tell you from me personally that [for] our team at LinkedIn, managing compassionately is a game-changer in terms of the way we do things and the way we are able to collaborate.
We first launched the website in May 5, 2003, so we are not exactly a young company by [Silicon] Valley standards. But, yeah, we think about how to maintain a culture of innovation, how to maintain a culture of transformation, how to constantly, constantly reinforce thinking like a startup, taking intelligent risks, being entrepreneurial.
If you start from a place where you are codifying values that you find yourself leading from anyway, that’s how you are constantly reinforcing it.
It starts with your recruiting efforts. Who are you bringing into the company and how strong of a cultural fit are those individuals? And in the early stages of hyper-growth those are where a lot of companies go off the rails.
They will be so in need of filling seats to keep up with demand that they will meet people that have the skill, but are not necessarily a cultural fit. And they will recognize it, and they will know it, and rationalize it by saying “We’ll make it work,” or “They’ll come around,” or “We’ll show them our company’s way.”
Taking intelligent risks and acting like an owner, those are two of our values, and so that helps maintain that spirit of entrepreneurship.
I think when organizations, teams and individuals are too hard on themselves with regard to things that didn’t go right, I think it has a tendency to shut people down unintentionally.
Some organizations like to talk about celebrating failure. That may be a little much for some folks, but being honest with yourself about what you tried, and why it didn’t work, and what you could learn from it, and how you can apply that going forward, and do better the next time around, I think that’s possible.
Focusing on the deal at the exclusion of the integration is like thinking about your wedding day and not thinking about the success of your marriage.
