Chrystia Freeland

Saying ‘yes’ is one of the dominant tropes of American life. America’s favorite politicians are the sunny optimists: think Ronald Reagan and “Morning in America.” In fact, the culture is so insistent on looking on the bright side that, as Barbara Ehrenreich complained in a recent book, injunction can be heard on the cancer ward. You might even say — and some historians have — that Americans themselves have been pre-selected for their optimism: you or your ancestors had to have a powerful faith in the New World and the opportunities here to make the trek over in the first place.

That’s why when I interviewed Nikesh Arora, Google’s head of sales, operations and business development at a media conference last week, one of his comments had particular resonance with the live midtown Manhattan audience and in the blogosphere shortly afterwards. Google, Arora said, works hard to create “a culture of yes.”

Arora described the Google approach as an “inversion” of the attitude in more traditional companies, where “everybody in management is trying to look at where the flaw is when somebody is presenting. Everybody is trying to figure out what’s wrong with their plan.” At the Googleplex, by contrast, “we’re going to say what’s right with it, let’s find a way to say yes.”

According to Arora, creating a culture of yes is central to creating a culture of innovation. As he put it: “the more times you say yes, the more you create a culture of yes, the more likely you’re going to have people innovating and coming up with great ideas. The more you say no, people will absorb that, anticipate that and say, ‘What’s the point of me trying to innovate, management is going to say no anyway’.”

Google’s culture of yes extends to the pay-checks of its employees: a couple of weeks before I interviewed Arora, Google had given all of its 20,000 staff members a $1000 holiday bonus and decreed a company-wide 10 per cent pay raise.

At last Friday’s Wharton Private Equity Partners Distressed Investing Symposium, Chrystia interviewed Mark Gallogly, co-founder and managing principal at Centerbridge Partners, a private equity and credit investment firm with $12 billion in assets under management. Gallogly said finding good opportunities in the distressed sector has become tougher as the “wall of maturities” (the point in time when debt must be refinanced) has been pushed further into the future, thanks to the booming market for corporate debt.

He notes, however, that the wall has been extended mainly for bank notes and senior debt; not for securities that are subordinate on the capital structure, like junior debt. So distressed investors should keep an eye out for situations in which a corporation’s junior debt matures much earlier than its senior debt:

Aside from buoyant bond markets, Gallogly said private equity also faces a challenge of dealing with an abundance of capital at a time when interest rates are reversing their long-term downward trend:

Nikesh Arora, Google’s President of Global Sales Operations and Business Development, spoke to Chrystia yesterday at a panel during the Paley Center for Media’s November International Council meeting. Arora explained how Google is able to keep its garage-workshop spirit of innovation even as the company swelled to 20,000 employees. The key, he said, was to establish a “culture of yes” where the default option is for management to approve employees’ new ideas andprojects rather than trying to nitpick and say no. Several of Google’s most recent initiatives, from driverless cars to a new offshore power grid to promote wind power, were the byproduct of this bottom-up process.

In response to Chrystia’s question about whether Facebook’s new e-mail service will steal users away from Google, Arora said the “internet is not a zero-sum game.” He predicted that in five to eight years, 80 to 90 percent of people’s time will be spent on internet-enabled devices, and in such a world, it would be impossible for any one company to dominate all online behavior.  Arora foresaw a future in which there are 15 to 20 players that provide the most popular online services, and that he would include Google and Facebook in that list.

Finally Arora shared his outlook for what areas Google is investing in most heavily.  He said the company’s focus on advertising, while sizable, is aimed only at the 10% of the $600 – $700 billion ad market that is online.  In five to eight years, he predicted 30 to 50 percent of the ad market will shift to online.  Google will be poised to take advantage of that shift, as well as the shift to personalization and interactivity in ads that will occur in the near term.

Surf the web or watch TV and you will probably conclude that American politicians and American pundits don’t agree on much at the moment. But that polarized public discourse obscures the equally important fact that Americans are remarkably united when it comes to determining what the big issues facing the country are.

This isn’t a moment when the nation is divided between isolationists, who want to focus on domestic issues, and expansionists, who want to focus on the rest of the world; nor is this an era when the political debate is about whether social policy—those old standbys like abortion, gay rights and family values—or economic concerns—be they poverty reduction or business growth—should be pre-eminent.

Instead, everyone is pretty much agreed on the big challenges facing America: stimulating economic growth, balancing the budget and finding a place for the United States in the world economy. There is even consensus, at the broadest level, on what the country needs to do to achieve all three: save more and spend less; invest more in social and physical infrastructure and less in personal consumption.

Back in September Chrystia appeared on a panel for public-interest communications firm Fenton that addressed the state of corporate social responsibility in business today. She elaborated on her August op-ed in the Washington Post that argued that CSR is a “a fetish encouraged by the philanthropies that feed off it and funded by the corporate executives who have found that it serves their bottom line.” Check out the highlights.

You can watch the entire panel here.

Posted by Peter Rudegeair.

This fall, much of the United States seemed to have settled on a narrative for the country’s struggle to adapt, after a debilitating financial crisis, to a post-industrial and post-unipolar global economy: China and its undervalued currency are largely to blame.

Proof that this was a nationally compelling storyline came during the acrimonious midterm election campaign. U.S. politics have rarely been more polarized, but complaining about China was something both parties could agree on.

John Boehner, the presumptive new Republican Speaker of the House, attacked the Democrats for “a stimulus that shipped jobs overseas to China instead of creating jobs here at home.” Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who hung on to his Senate seat and his job as Majority Leader, accused his Tea Party opponent Sharron Angle of being “a foreign worker’s best friend” for supporting corporate tax breaks that helped businesses outsource jobs to China and India.

Chrystia discusses the Fed’s recent decision to launch a new round of quantitative easing on the PBS NewsHour:

You can read the transcript here.

Posted by Peter Rudegeair.

A favorite theme of American business and political elites at the moment is that authoritarian regimes—i.e., China—may be better at making hard, long-term economic decisions than are querulous democracies—i.e., the United States. There is plenty of academic research to suggest that, over the long term, this view is wrong. But in the shorter term—this week in fact—America itself offered a case study of this scary theory.

Consider: On Tuesday, Americans swung sharply to the right, giving their Democratic President a shellacking and handing control of the House of Representatives to the Republicans. The country’s most powerful elected Republican, John Boehner, who will be the new speaker, immediately declared it was a vote for “cutting spending” and “smaller, less costly government.” Most analysts, including happy ones on Wall Street, who are often most cheerful when the country’s elected officials are least active, decided it was a vote for gridlock, thanks to the Democrats’ continued control of both the Senate and the White House.

Then, on Wednesday, America’s most powerful unelected Republican, Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, swooped in with massive government action, announcing a plan to pump $600 billion dollars into the U.S. economy over the next two years. That is not much smaller than two of the big government interventions that earned the Democrats their shellacking—the $700 billion TARP program (never mind the pesky fact that it was actually a Republican Secretary of the Treasury who invented it) and the $787 billion stimulus.

Don Graham, Chairman and CEO of the Washington Post Company, visited the Reuters studio this morning to chat with Chrystia about the future of the company’s Kaplan subsidiary as well as its flagship newspaper. In addition to its popular test preparation courses, Kaplan operates 75 colleges and graduate schools, both online and through brick-and-mortar campuses, that serve 112,000 students. Earlier this year the Department of Education lashed out at for-profit colleges like Kaplan for misleading prospective students about tuition costs and salaries after graduation. The Department proposed new regulations on these institutions that would tie federal aid to the number of students who are repaying their loans.

Graham said that while the Department’s efforts to crack down on bad actors are right-minded, the current proposals will end up having an unintentional yet harmful effect on low-income students:

There is a 99% correlation between the number of Pell Grant students—the number of poor students a campus serves—and the repayment rate under the proposed Department rules… The Department has scored a direct hit on schools that serve poor students. They didn’t want to. They didn’t mean to. But that is what they did. And I hope they’ll reconsider that rule and propose something that in fact cracks down on bad actors but does not punish schools that serve poor students.

Tony Hsieh and Sanjay Madan wrote the program to create LinkExchange over a weekend. Before the following weekend, they had more than a dozen websites participating in their ad-sharing network. Over the next several weeks they worked frantically on the project. They refined their business in real time, learning—quickly!—from their mistakes. Less than a year later, the Harvard grads were offered $1 million (U.S.) for the company. Less than a year after that, they sold it for $265 million.

That was 1996. Since then, this story of development on the run has become commonplace. Hacker culture is now part of the broader culture: “beta test” is in the dictionary, and we accept innovative, albeit imperfect, beta releases even from multibillion-dollar global behemoths such as Google. We’re prepared to accept flaws because the tech revolution is progressing so quickly that it is usually better to be fast, and possibly wrong, than to try to be perfect and end up being slow. By the time your flawless product is released, it will likely be obsolete.

Technologists aren’t the only people operating in a rapidly changing, uncertain environment. Thanks both to the tech revolution and to globalization, that is true of all of us, including our governments. But, as Nobel-Prize winning economist Michael Spence argued at a private equity conference in Quebec City this week, emerging-market governments seem to be better at dealing with an unpredictable, volatile world than Western ones. They are like Silicon Valley entrepreneurs—willing to act swiftly, even if it means making mistakes. Leaders in the West are more like Detroit, reluctant to make bold moves until it is too late.