Susan Wojcicki offered lessons on Titanic and Frozen in 2014

The former YouTube boss died on Friday after affected by lung cancer for 2 years. A pioneer from Silicon Valley, she headed various divisions of Google and its parent company Alphabet for greater than twenty years.

On Graduation Ceremony 2014 Wojcicki, who worked for the UCLA Anderson School of Management, where she earned her MBA in 1998, repeated her own commencement speech on the Anderson School of Management.

The speaker was the then US Filter CEO Richard Heckmann, who died in 2020. While discussing the Titanic and ten lessons learned from her infamous sinking in 1912, there was one statement that stood out and resonated throughout her profession.

“You can be very wrong,” Wojcicki told the graduates.

Although the Titanic had the most recent technology on the time and was considered unsinkable, its hubris caused it to collide with an iceberg and sink, she added.

Wojcicki reflected on that lesson as she helped construct Google and through the dot-com crash, when she often drove past empty buildings that when housed big-name web corporations.

“And I thought, you can be very wrong,” she recalled. “It turns out that was true for Google when we were a small company, but it’s even more true for us now that we’re bigger. When big companies fall, they fall much deeper. When you’re steering a big ship, it’s even harder to see the icebergs. And when you do see them, it’s even harder to turn the ship around to avoid those icebergs and steer away.”

Wojcicki identified how the smartphone revolution suddenly turned the web landscape on its head and urged the audience to embrace the change, echoing a management lesson from the 2013 Disney film. Frozen.

A key consider the film’s success was Disney’s use of YouTube, she explained. After the film was released, fans began uploading their very own covers of the film’s theme song, “Let It Go,” to YouTube.

Disney could have easily asked the platform to remove these videos, but as a substitute the entertainment giant selected to vary and respect its audience, Wojcicki said. “They just let it go.”

Every industry will face changes that can have serious consequences for businesses as recent technologies emerge and consumer preferences change, she added.

“It feels unusual, our instinct tells us to fight it. But we have to accept it. We have to let it go,” she said.

In 2016, Wojcicki predicted that changes were coming to the media industry, saying: Fortunes Jennifer Reingold that the long run would belong to individual content creators who had the facility to construct an audience on YouTube.

“They are their own media companies. They are the CEO, they are the personality, and as they grow they have production, editors and writers behind them, and so we really have this next generation of media companies,” she predicted.

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