From The McKinsey Quarterly
January 2009
Hal Varian on how the Web challenges managers
Google’s chief economist says executives in wired organizations need a sharper understanding of how technology empowers innovation.
More than ten years into the widespread business adoption of the Web, some managers still fail to grasp the economic implications of cheap and ubiquitous information on and about their business. Hal Varian, professor of information sciences, business, and economics at the University of California at Berkeley, says it’s imperative for managers to gain a keener understanding of the potential for technology to reconfigure their industries. Varian, currently serving as Google's chief economist, compares the current period to previous times of industrialization when new technologies combined to create ever more complex and valuable systems—and thus reshaped the economy.
Varian spoke with McKinsey’s James Manyika, a director in the San Francisco office, in Napa, California, in October 2008.
