Eric Schmidt interview

Business 2.0 :: Magazine Article :: Features :: The 70 Percent Solution
By John Battelle, November 28, 2005 "

Before he arrived at Google (GOOG) in 2001 to serve as adult supervision for Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt was little known outside Silicon Valley. With his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley and research stints at Bell Labs and Xerox�s (XRX) famed Palo Alto Research Center, he had a solid reputation among geeks, cemented by his championing of the Java programming language as Sun Microsystems�s (SUNW) chief technology officer. And he faced his first real management test as CEO of Novell, the troubled software maker that has fought a long, difficult war with Microsoft (MSFT).

These days Schmidt is on a stellar winning streak, recruiting top talent, seeing his company through a stunning IPO, and fending off rivals from Barry Diller to Bill Gates to Terry Semel -- while trying to keep Google�s good-guy reputation intact. How does he do it? One rule was handed to him by Brin and Page when he walked in the door: Don't be evil. The other one is a formula he uses to stay on track while innovating: Spend 70 percent of your time on the core business, 20 percent on related projects, and 10 percent on unrelated new businesses. Business 2.0 talked to Schmidt to find out how he and his colleagues live by those rules.

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