Many of us strive to work at the intersection of really smart people, really strong technology advancement and differentiated thinking. That combination of elements ultimately leads to better results. Sean Downey, President, Americas & Global Partners at Google lives at that intersection.
As Sean explains, you have to have a really innovative culture that has tremendous amounts of psychological safety, where people feel like they can come in and contribute ideas and that they belong. Only then will they feel really comfortable pushing the envelope on how to innovate and make things better. Oh, and he never punishes failure. As Sean states, "I love a healthy dose of failure and it's something that as long as we learn something, we can fall forward on it."
Sean believes that innovative organizations strike a healthy balance between innovation and doing the common things commonly. He states that "we're here to invent status quo." What does this mean? Well, Sean likes to innovate on the edge, and he has a cycle that starts with incubation as an idea in the form of a test, which then he proves works. Then and only then does Sean think about growing it, along with a handful of other things that were also successful. And then, he thinks about scaling it. Once scaled, it become the new common and the new starting point for the cycle to start over.
As President of Americas & Global Partners at Google, Sean leads the company’s advertising business in North and South America. Before this role he served as the Vice President of the Google Marketing Platform for the Americas, helping Marketers, Agencies and Partners leverage data and technology to advance their Digital Marketing Maturity and buy and measure media more efficiently. Prior to joining Google in 2008, Sean was the Vice President of Buy Side Sales at DoubleClick, where he led their agency and advertiser business. Sean has also worked in various ad technology and software startups, and over the course of his career has brought various evolving advertising technologies to market such as rich media and programmatic buying and analytics.