Strategist
Google's Trading Room
Brent Callinicos (BSBA ’87, MBA ’89) joined Google as VP and treasurer in 2007, and now manages $35 billion in cash. His brainchild, a trading room at the Mountain View, Calif-based company to manage the firm’s portfolio has been profiled in Businessweek.
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Making real organizational contributions with fresh strategic thinking.
Second Paragraph: Brent Callinicos (BSBA ’87, MBA ’89) joined Google as VP and treasurer in 2007, and now manages $35 billion in cash. His brainchild, a trading room at the Mountain, View, Calif-based company to manage the firm’s portfolio has been profiled in Businessweek.
Callinicos has had to adapt to challenging situations several times in his career, most notably when he was asked to take over a horizontal line business at Microsoft that he had no experience managing – a division with 700,000 partners that was struggling to perform.
Ultimately, Callinicos found success managing the business by relying on adaptive intelligence, and came to view the experience as valuable to his career path. Right after joining Google, Callinicos sat down with CEO Eric Schmidt to discuss the role.
"He told me, ‘You know what a world class treasury looks like – go build one.’ It felt like going back in time a little bit. It was a company where everyone was excited about what they were doing. It wasn’t management anymore; it was change. It was a blank sheet of paper Don’t manage – change. If you have the opportunity to have a blank sheet of paper, take it."
As an executive who favors what he describes as "over communication," Callinicos fosters the innovation that Google is envied for by ensuring that the people he works with know that he believes in what he calls "No Inappropriate Pride of Ownership."
"I don’t want anybody to think that because I created something that we shouldn’t change it. If we haven’t changed something in 12 months, why? I also hire people that have the same mentality about areas they build. At Google the best idea holds."