Mr. Page has never been more impatient than he is now. He is on an urgent mission to pull Google through a midlife crisis that threatens to knock it off its perch as the coolest company in Silicon Valley.
Founded in 1998, Google is not yet 15, but in tech years, it is an aging giant that moves a lot slower than it did when it was a hot start-up. It is losing employees to the new, hotter start-ups, and is being pushed around by government regulators and competitors like Facebook, Apple and Amazon, which are all vying for people’s online time.
So Mr. Page, Google’s co-founder and former chief executive, who returned to the top job in April, is making changes large and small. He dropped more than 25 projects, saying they were not popular enough. He masterminded Google’s biggest deal by billions, the $12.5 billion Motorola Mobility bid, a bold move that positions the company to enter the hardware business.
Borrowing from the playbooks of executives like Steven P. Jobs and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, he has put his personal imprint on the corporate culture, from discouraging excessive use of e-mail to embracing quick, unilateral decision-making — by him, if need be.
“Ever since taking over as C.E.O., I have focused much of my energy on increasing Google’s velocity and execution, and we’re beginning to see results,” Mr. Page, 38, told analysts recently.
Naysayers fret that in his rush to refocus the company, and especially in ending projects, he risks squelching Google’s trademark innovation, which bubbles up when engineers are given the time to experiment. “He’s going to lose some people at the end of the day,” said one employee who, like others, agreed to speak only anonymously because the company bars them from talking to the press without prior approval.
“He’s certainly been active,” said Mark Mahaney, an analyst covering Google at Citigroup. “Whether he’ll be active and successful, we don’t know.”
His new responsibilities have changed Mr. Page, an engineer by training and personality. Judging by his few public appearances, he has learned to talk the corporate talk to shareholders and analysts, though he still generally declines to speak to the press, including for this article.
He even broke down and hired an administrative assistant, after letting his previous one go years ago. She schedules him for those dreaded meetings. But they are only 50 minutes long, because in one of his first companywide memos after he took the job, he decreed that hourlong meetings must allow time for a bathroom break in between.
Despite the many external pressures on Google, it is dominant in its business and highly profitable. But, when asked at a recent conference about the biggest threat to his company, Mr. Page answered in one word, “Google.”
The problem was that the company had ballooned so quickly — it now has more than 31,000 employees and $27.3 billion in revenue so far this year — that it had become sclerotic. A triumvirate of Mr. Page, his co-founder, Sergey Brin, and Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s former chief and current chairman, had to agree before anything could be done. The unwieldy management and glacial pace of decision-making were particularly noticeable in the Valley, where start-ups overtake behemoths in months.
It is different now.
“It’s much more of a style like Steve Jobs than the three-headed monster that Google was,” said a former Google executive who has spoken with current executives about the changes and spoke anonymously to preserve business relationships. “When Eric was there, you’d walk into a product meeting or a senior staff meeting, and everyone got to weigh in on every decision. Larry is much more willing to make an O.K. decision and make it now, rather than a perfect decision later.”
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