Google Australia boss Maile Carnegie: People, get ready

Maile Carnegie has gone from marketing cosmetics to running Google Australia. Now she wants things to move even faster.

TWAM-20150627 EMBARGO FOR TWAM 27 June 2015 NO REUSE WITHOUT PERMISSION Maile Carnegie of Google Pic : Steve Baccon

It’s the tail end of last century, in the years BG (Before Google), and you’ve got an appointment with Maile ­Carnegie.

You hop on the ­Sydney Light Rail, heading west from Central, but you’ve lost her address. You alight in Pyrmont. Luckily, there’s a pay phone near the Sydney Fish Markets and — the gods are smiling — it works. Dialling 013 for Directory Assistance gets you a number and, after another phone call, you have an address. After consulting a brick-like street directory you trace a path to the harbourside offices where ­Carnegie reigns as managing director of the ­Australian outpost for arguably the most powerful tech company in the world. (Those offices didn’t exist back then? Shhhh. We’re playing pretend.)

Now, fast-forward just 15 years. This is the future, and the future is now. Tap. You get up Google on your smartphone, and virtually all the information in the world is at your fingertips. Tap. You google-map where Google’s office is located. You can even — tap, tap — google-­image Carnegie herself.

Before you even meet the tall, gap-toothed blonde, you can — tap — determine that she was born 46 years ago in Hawaii to American ­parents who met in the Peace Corps, and that Maile (pronounced Miley) is the name of a ­white flower found only in the hills of Maui. You can, with a few more taps, discover that she lives in Hunters Hill, on Sydney’s North Shore, with her consultant husband Charles and their sons Nicholas, 15, and Matthew, 12. That she worked for the multinational consumer goods company Procter & Gamble for 21 years before cold-calling Google’s Australian offshoot and landing the top job there in July 2013.

You’ll find that last year she described herself at an event run by Chief Executive Women as “a contrarian” and “a bit of a shit-­stirrer”. And you’ll discover that, in April, she fronted a ­Senate inquiry into corporate tax avoidance, defiantly pointing out a few home truths about Australia’s “uncompetitive” tax regime.

If you google beyond the first page, you’ll find a few blog grumbles about the wisdom of appointing an executive with expertise in marketing moisturiser and disposable nappies to one of the top technology jobs in Australia.

Google won’t tell you this, but tech industry leader Steve Vamos will: Although Carnegie lacks a deep tech or media background, she has the “mindset of change” necessary to lead the way into the brave new world of digital domination. Tech investor and former Microsoft executive Daniel Petre will add that Carnegie is “super bright” and, through her access to ­Google’s brains trust in Mountain View, ­California, has a crucial perspective on the earth-­rattling new technologies coming down the pike and how they will impact Australia.

You won’t find this on Google either, but if you ask him, high-profile venture capitalist Mark Carnegie, Maile’s brother-in-law, will say: “People need to listen to Maile because she is smart and she is right.”

For Maile has a message: We may have experienced mind-warping change over the past 15 years — fast-tracking from pay phones to smartphones, from dial-up connections to machine learning and advanced robotics — but we ain’t seen nothing yet. The digital revolution is accelerating and the future’s coming on at speed, full of promise and peril. Australia has got to get ready. And we’d better hurry up.

Carnegie and Google are well-matched. She has a rebellious streak, evident from her early days at the University of Technology, Sydney, where she was the first student permitted to do a double major (marketing and economics) after energetically petitioning the dean of the business school. She championed innovation at Procter & Gamble during a tenure in which she led its marketing and design functions in Asia and ran multiple billion-dollar brands in North America on her way to becoming managing director of P&G Australia.

“One of Maile’s skills is that she has a great balance between respect for existing structure and the desire to question,” says Mark Carnegie, who heads the Sydney-based private equity firm M.H. Carnegie. “At Procter & Gamble, she clearly was an outlier; less so at Google but as she’s not from tech, she might shake the status quo there too.”

To ride the bleeding edge of a world in transition requires an adventurous and nimble mind. “You can’t just drink the Kool-Aid all the time,” says Petre, adding that people should ­listen to Carnegie’s warning that Australia needs to step on the pedal in building an innovation culture. “We need more people like her to be talking eloquently, articulately, with data, about this. It’s not just a technology issue, this is a societal issue. The reality for Australia is that on our current course and speed we are in deep, deep trouble.”

I’ve been waiting not five minutes on a groovy but unyielding chair in Google headquarters at Pyrmont when the boss strides in looking every inch the alpha Googler in power heels and a geometric-print long jacket. She walks past her standing desk — close to a wall of windows offering a drop-dead gorgeous view of Sydney Harbour — and sits opposite. “These chairs look funky and cool but they’re not actually that comfortable,” she offers, with the first of many high-spirited chortles.

Google HQ is famous for being one of the coolest workplaces in the country. So cool that when Carnegie moved over from the corporate suit-wearing realm of Procter & Gamble, she had to buy a whole new wardrobe. She also acquired a few cutting-edge gadgets, citing her new Android watch as “a game changer” which she feels lost without.

The newly re-attired executive has kept a fairly low profile while settling into the job and this is one of just a handful of interviews she has granted. Carnegie didn’t court it, but the spotlight found her earlier this year when she was called before the Senate tax inquiry to answer accusations that the company was dodging tax here after revelations its Australian arm paid $7.1 million in tax in 2013 on a profit of $46.5 million and revenue of $357.7 million. (For tax purposes, Google Australia doesn’t count revenues earned from its lucrative search business).

Carnegie has a thin voice, with a faint, naturally occurring quaver. But, under the watchful eye of the nation’s media, she marked herself as someone unafraid to speak her mind. When questioned on the morality of her company’s behaviour, she made what some observers considered a killer point, highlighting how fraught this issue is in the emerging digital economy. “We’re not opposed to paying tax; we’re opposed to being uncompetitive,” she told the senators. “So when I think about the morality of it, I think the ­people who need to answer ‘What is that right number?’, quite frankly, are the people sitting on your side of the room.”

Here in Pyrmont, she gives a short laugh at the suggestion she behaved defiantly, pausing to consider her next words. “I am very happy,” she says slowly, “to participate in any process like that and put my ideas forward as long as you get the sense they are going to be listened to and taken forward. I’m still kind of TBD [to be decided], waiting on what comes out of it.

“Fundamentally, the point I was trying to make is that there are global accounting standards that apply to Australian companies that are headquartered in Australia and US companies that are headquartered in the US. We need to make sure that if we’re going to make changes to laws, they apply evenly and fairly. Some of the stuff that people are talking about is likely just going to result in Australian multinationals paying less in Australia.

“The other point was that Google is in ­competition. But I think Australia needs to understand … Australia is in competition. I’m not even talking tax now. On talent and all sorts of things, we are now part of an open economy and we need to understand that we are competing with these other countries.”

Carnegie segues into one of her favourite subjects: the need for Australia to start redefining success in global terms. “I think there was a good reason for [defining success domestically] decades ago, which was the tyranny of distance. But the reality today is that a trip to Europe isn’t 17,000km — it’s 420 milliseconds, from a commerce standpoint.” Carnegie spits out data like a ticker-tape machine: Ninety-nine per cent of the ­internet’s uses have yet to be discovered; by 2030, the economies of India and China will be larger than those of the US and Europe combined; Australia is the 12th largest economy in the world, yet ranks only 17th on the Global Innovation Index. There are 1.4 million homes in Australia that don’t have internet access. STEM skills (science, technology, engineering and maths) are critical for the new era, yet only 16 per cent of students are graduating with a STEM-related degree (compared to 50 per cent of graduates in Singapore, for example).

Alongside quotes from such disparate sources as Mao Zedong and Mike Tyson, Carnegie drops these data bombs into conversation and lets their impact ripple. What does it all mean? “I think that we are at an inflection point as a country,” Carnegie says. “We are either going to put in place the incentives and the enablers to create the next version of Australia as a best-­in-class innovation country or we’re not. And I think it’s going to be a very stark choice that we have to make as a community.”

Carnegie wants to believe we can do it. “It feels like over the last decade or so we’ve become world experts at risk-minimisation and rule-making,” she says. “But there is an opportunity to recapture the spirit of our culture, because to innovate you need to be risk-takers and rule-breakers.”

Google’s Sydney outpost doesn’t have the indoor bike lane the Netherlands office boasts, nor the rock-climbing wall of the Boston bureau. It does have an LED disco floor (untouched by the feet of Maile — there are ­limits to her image makeover) and a table made from a bathtub filled with rubber ducks. The rest is a photogenic playground of colourful stencilled walls, micro-kitchens, games consoles and ping pong tables. A tame parrot named Basil flits between the greenery-backed reception area and the great outdoors.

The place exudes Googliness — an actual intra-office term for the fun, innovative nature of the company and a reason the brand can attract top talent. (Vadim Gerasimov, the ­Russian who helped invent the video game Tetris, works here.) Sales and marketing is the focus, but there is also a significant research and development team, with about 500 engineers working under engineering director Alan Noble, who reports directly to Google’s US headquarters. Google Maps started in Australia and, while the R&D team responsible is still the ­biggest, engineers at Pyrmont also work on Google Drive and the Chrome web browser.

Carnegie says that, beyond the extravagant perks, Googlers are lured by the chance to work on “big, important stuff that matters”. ­“[Googlers] like the positive, world-changing mission of the company,” she says. “They want to be part of this wonderful crazy place that is, you know, putting balloons up in the sky to connect the next two billion people in the world to the internet.” She’s talking about Project Loon, Google’s ambitious plan to use high-altitude balloons to beam internet to remote areas — just one of the ways Google has grown well beyond its initial purview.

When Americans Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded the search behemoth in 1998, its mission was to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible using a sophisticated (and constantly evolving) algorithm. They named it Google as a play on the word “googol”, the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros. Once it had captured an audience, Google monetised it with AdWords, a service that places advertising near the list of search results, and it became an intrinsic part of the culture. (In 2006, the verb to “google” had so infiltrated the everyday lexicon that it was added to the dictionary.)

Google has since become known for taking seemingly bonkers ideas and making them a reality. Following on from Google Glass, self-driving cars and its acquisition of artificial intelligence start-up DeepMind, the company used its annual conference last month to unveil two new ideas: an advance on motion-sensing technology (Project Soli), to bring Minority Report-style gesture control to wearables, and Project Jacquard, which uses special conductive strands of yarn to turn jackets or pants into touch-interfaces for nearby devices.

Page and Brin may have started Google with the unofficial slogan “Don’t be evil”, claiming not to be motivated by money, but not everyone is buying it. As well as being put in the naughty corner by the Australian Taxation Office, Google is making enemies in its own and adjacent industries. Along with other ­internet “aggregators”, Google has come under fire for flouting copyright laws by “stealing” content from traditional media outlets, including News Corp (publisher of The Weekend Australian Magazine). And, while it’s hard now to imagine a world without Google, its total dominance as a search engine is being questioned.

Others are growing wary of the potential for Google to abuse its position as a database for vast amounts of users’ personal information, collected through the ads it serves, queries it handles and emails it scans. Princeton computer scientist Edward Felten called it “perhaps the most difficult privacy issue in all of human history”. Earlier this month, Google went some way to addressing users’ concerns about online security and privacy: those who would rather not let the company track their location and browsing activity or see what they’re watching on YouTube — a Google subsidiary — can now, Carnegie says, “easily assess and have control over their own information”.

“It’s critical for us to maintain trust,” she says. “[The company’s secretive innovation lab] Google X and all these other areas aren’t worth much if we can’t get the basics right.”

Ultimately, a large chunk of Google’s business model is selling advertising solutions. This is where Carnegie comes in. “She comes with the best marketing pedigree in the world, from P&G, and she’s worked overseas — that places her very well to lead a company like Google,” says Vamos, a former head of Microsoft ­Australia and a current non-executive director of a variety of companies, including Telstra.

Petre, who heads up tech venture capital fund AirTree, agrees that technology CEOs in Australia don’t need a deep tech background. “The majority of time now, whether you’re at Microsoft, Oracle, SAP or IBM, is not spent in deep product development — it’s to do with ­subsidiaries, mainly sales and marketing support-related activities,” he says.

At P&G, Carnegie was responsible for ­marketing budgets with big digital spends and was clearly no Luddite, although she doesn’t know how to code, for example. (She also prefers to read things that “I really want to sit down and deeply understand” on paper rather than a screen.) Once she got up to speed on tech, she was free to embrace a workplace culture that Google bills as fostering “a healthy disregard for the impossible”.

Carnegie’s passion for innovation predated the Google job. When she returned to ­Australia in 2010 after a stint in Singapore she started to get nervous about the way Australia was lagging. It was a no-brainer, she says, to look to where the real ­disruptive ­innovation was happening and, in 2012, she told her husband Charles that her dream job was to run Google Australia.

Her ears pricked up a year later when she heard Nick Leeder was leaving the post to head up Google France. “When I read the job description my first thought was ‘Drats, I’m not going to get it; I don’t have all of the prerequisites for the role’,” Carnegie says. Charles, however, wasn’t having it: he “lectured” her for 30 minutes on why her previous work experience made her perfectly suited for the job.

“I have a great memory so it became a script and it also gave me the confidence to pick up the phone and cold call,” she says. “I tend to be fearless advocating for my family, friends, business and things I believe in but a bit reticent about advocating for myself.”

Carnegie’s appointment confounded market speculation that Jason Pellegrino, the sales director, would inherit the role. But leading media buyers applauded the choice. “Having had the classical training at P&G, she talks the same language as marketers and she can traverse technology, business and marketing, which is quite a rare skill,” says Leigh Terry, CEO of Omnicom Media Group Australia. “She was an early adopter and an evangelist for all things digital in her former role at P&G, so there was a little bit of serendipity there — right role, right person, right time.”

Besides wanting to be at the pointy end of the revolution, Carnegie had felt herself ­straining against P&G’s conservative, 170-year-old corporate culture. She felt more at home with Google’s egalitarian, unorthodox style. “I had done enough crazy stuff during my time at P&G [to realise] I tended to skew more towards this leadership style,” she says. “The businesses that were created before this Web 2.0 world were traditionally organised like a ­military hierarchy, so it’s a very command-and-control model, and they were created in eras of high stability when there was a scarcity of innovation,” she says. Google required a total reset. “One of the best pieces of advice I received was, ‘You will be an effective leader if you have the assumption that you are leading a volunteer army’.”

Maile Carnegie never had a grand plan. She comes from a family of teachers — her parents moved from Boston to Australia when she was four because of the 1970s teacher shortage — and all she knew was that she didn’t want to be a teacher. When she was young, her father ensured she and older sister Vicki were exposed to a broad palette of experience; she learnt music, visited art galleries and museums. “I think part of the problem for me is that I’ve always enjoyed such a diverse set of subject ­matter,” she says. “I loved biology, I loved ­history, I loved just about everything.” After leaving Cheltenham Girls’ High, a public school in Sydney’s northwest, she worked at a fruit and veg shop and in the shoe department of Grace Bros (now part of Myer), before enrolling at UTS. Even there, she was torn between two majors and, in an early display of insurrection, lobbied for a rule change so she could do both. “It took me a while to land on the fact that synthesising diverse information and problem solving is what I actually love,” she says. “There’s no job for that — knowledge synthesiser — so it probably took me a while to find my place.”

She joined P&G in 1992 and worked in the Australia/New Zealand marketing team for seven years before taking up a job as marketing and commercial director in the company’s ­Cincinnati head office, where she stayed until 2006. In Singapore, she ran P&G’s beauty care business and was general manager for Asia strategy, marketing and design. It was while working in the Sydney office of P&G that she met her future husband. Charles Carnegie, managing director of consulting firm the Waypoint Group, keeps her on her toes.

“He’s incredibly intellectually rigorous and incredibly well read,” she says. “I love learning and his rate of information digestion is un-be-lievable. Between leaving for work in the morning and coming home, he will have absorbed so much information and we can get into these crazy philosophical debates.

“I had dated men previously that would basically roll over and let me tickle their tummy, and I pretty much won every argument. So it’s great having a man who’s obviously got all the wonderful values and all that important stuff, but on top of who is so voraciously intelligent and also won’t put up with my rubbish.” What sort of rubbish? “Oh, I’m opinionated and stubborn and all that,” she laughs. “I also love debating and some people can interpret that as arguing when really I just love debating.”

Family is the cornerstone of Carnegie’s life, and she has consciously chosen work-life ­integration in order to see more of them. “I bring the boys along to Google events; we went out to see the FIRST Robotics Competition final together, for example. That way it’s not kept separate and it’s not a matter of balancing the two — it’s about bringing them together.”

She is probably more aware than most of the need to prepare sons Nicholas and Matthew for a digital future. “Like most other mums I have all the ‘Come on, get off the screen’ conversations but … for me it’s all about how to make the technology really attractive and exciting for them and also about opening their eyes up to future opportunities.”

The boys recently switched from programming model robots for battle to experimenting with their new 3D printer. “The youngest, his major project this year is he’s going to focus on 3D printing and the impact of that on composition and design,” she says. “They’re things that we couldn’t even imagine when we were growing up. With my boys, it’s all about putting the stuff that I hope will be interesting to them in front of them, rather than saying, ‘Hey, go and learn coding.’”

Carnegie warns that Australia is going ­backwards in terms of producing a digitally ­literate workforce. She’s with Australia’s Chief ­Scientist, Ian Chubb, in pointing a finger at the ­crisis in ­science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) education. Chubb cautions that participation rates in science subjects at Year 11 and 12 are the lowest they’ve been in two decades, and that two-thirds of students in Year 12 maths subjects are choosing general or elementary maths rather than mid-level or advanced maths. Chubb’s message — that STEM is essential for an economy that can compete on a global stage — is gaining traction, with the federal ­government set to embark on a consultation process to develop a national STEM strategy.

Pedal to the metal, Carnegie says, as we are already trailing. “If you look at 457 visas [for skilled migrant workers], back in 2008 there were only 30 granted for professionals in tech and science,” she says. “In 2012, that number was over 5500. We don’t know what the new jobs will look like because they haven’t been ­created yet, but we know that the number one thing we will need is STEM skills.”

She’s encouraged by the fact that the rate of tech digestion by “everyday Aussies” is high, with our adoption of gadgets such as smartphones and wearables outstripping the US and Europe. But we are better consumers than ­producers of new technology, she says, with a stifling amount of government regulation and self-regulation by the business community ­putting the brakes on innovation. “Australia is great at actually inventing things but what we’re struggling with is innovation, which is how you actually create value from it,” she says.

The era of technology disrupting established business models, it is generally agreed, is only just getting started. The traditional industrial mindset has been supplanted by one that is “more ­caring, connected and enabling”, says Vamos. “The genie is out of the bottle and it’s only going to accelerate so we need leaders who will embrace, encourage and promote change. I think Maile can make a positive contribution to that evolution in the way we think.”

We’re going to need our hand held through this, if Petre’s predictions are correct. “It’s so obvious now to those who study [artificial intelligence] that probably within 30 years, maybe sooner, computers will be able to do everything humans can do,” he says, pointing to his “freaky” new virtual assistant, Clara Labs. “Any job that is a binary application of a set of rules is gone. Anyone in a driving job is toast — they’ll all be driverless cars and trucks. ­General practitioners get impacted by big-data analytics in diagnosis, and surgeons will be impacted by advanced robotics surgery. On one level, it’s super-exciting; on another, it’s … whoa.”

Carnegie leans towards super-exciting. “The internet should be this miraculous thing for us that unlocks so much opportunity for Australia,” she says. “I think at the moment what we’re missing is a plan or a vision that we can all get behind, where we say, ‘I know it’s risky, it’s not guaranteed what the outcome will be, but I believe we have a coherent plan and we’re going to give it a shot’.” Of course, you can’t google the future. Yet.