The value of curiosity, failure and growth from Google’s Chris Phillips (BSBA ’97)

By Vicki Christian
Fisher College of Business

Learning, listening and leading are at the heart of Chris Phillips’ daily life. As the vice president and general manager of Geo and Education at Google, his job is to take a broad view of how people learn and navigate in the world.

This view and Phillips’ unique experiences as a leader for the multinational tech giant captivated students Irina Sthapit, Miranda Holloway and Hala Ahmed, who gathered to hear Phillips talk about Google, its products and how technology and AI are changing the world.

Speaking as part of Fisher’s LeadX: Unplugged speaker series, Phillips (BSBA ’97) shared his career trajectory, which included six years as chief product officer and head of technology at Pandora, where he helped the company evolve to offer on-demand music alongside the radio experience. Following its acquisition by SiriusXM, he became the chief product and technology officer before leaving for Google.

“The consistent theme throughout my life is that I’m a builder; I love to build things. It’s part of my family’s history,” he said, standing in front of a Google Map view of Ohio State, Upper Arlington and Central Ohio roadways. “My grandfather had a road construction company in Columbus and many of these roads are still in existence today. My journey is about building, using the latest technology to deliver products that matter to the world. Now, I build roads in the digital world.”

Throughout his career, Phillips has been a part of changing consumer behavior through technology, including the early days of online banking and helping small businesses shift from computer software to mobile applications while at Intuit. He also helped Amazon Music evolve from downloading purchased music to music streaming.

Now, at Google, he’s responsible for the company's portfolio of mapping products, including Google Maps, Waze, Google Earth, Street View, and Google Maps Platform, and transforming the way people learn and teach through Google for Education.

While his specialization at Ohio State was in finance, he has found ways to transition his experience from one industry to another, creating products that are making a difference now and for the future, a reality of particular interest to his LeadX audience.

“When he talked about moving to different domains in his career, from banking to music to technology, it made me realize I don’t have to stick to one area of concentration,” said Sthapit, a Specialized Master in Business Analytics (SMB-A) student.

Holloway, a first-year electrical engineering PhD student, agreed.

“As an engineer, I can really delve deep into my subject and become an expert in that area,” she said. “By discussing his vast experience, he helped me see that I don’t need to box myself in and how my skills can be transferrable to being a leader in business.”

In his vast work, Phillips has tapped into the how and why products matter to the world, including recent technology like AI.

“AI is here and will change how things happen,” he said. “At Google, we are adopting it to change how we can make an impact.”

He cited Google’s response to the recent devastating wildfires in Los Angeles.

“Roads were closed and people needed to be able to navigate to safety,” Phillips said. “Through our app, we helped people find places to sleep and find fair prices on those hotels. We updated our satellite images so residents could get pictures of their homes to insurance agents immediately, thereby certifying their homes as total losses and providing settlement checks faster.”

For Ahmed, a fourth-year finance student, seeing things from a broader perspective will help her in one of her current projects.

“I’m minoring in engineering and am currently working on a capstone project at the intersection of business and engineering,” she said. “His insights into taking a product and looking at it from a broader ecosystem gave me a new perspective on how to apply this concept to my project.”

Google is also using Earth AI to understand and help predict what might happen during other disasters like floods and tornadoes. It provides environmental insights at scale with the ability to warn people up to 7 days prior to a potential disaster.

As a student using Google Earth’s radar remote sensing on satellites to better understand earth and natural disasters, Holloway found Phillips’ discussion useful for her research.

“I’m integrating data from a level sensor to see photorealistic views of the earth and pulling in data from cameras that sense waves we can’t see,” she said. “His discussion of Google Earth made me start to wonder how I can help produce the next generation of navigation.”

Phillips also discussed Google for Education and how, through its use of AI, it can stimulate curiosity in teacher-led environments, adapt to the learner to create completely individualized support, inspire active learning and help manage cognitive load. But it won’t do everything.

“I’m excited by what its possibilities are and that it will be able to do jobs that are otherwise impossible to do,” he said. “But it is a huge responsibility to use it; you have to look for abuse and negative uses. I feel like I work on two things that matter a lot: I’m at the intersection of decisions of safety and discovery.”

While he’s been successful throughout his career, Phillips admits to experiencing failure along the way.

“Having failure next to your name stings, but you have to dust yourself off and get back up,” he said. “I do that by turning it into a celebration; saying what the failure is out loud has made me better. I internalize it and own the mistake and then consider how I am better for it.”

He said response to failure says a lot about an employee; it’s something that can be turned into teachable moments for others.

“It was eye-opening to hear that if you can’t discuss in an interview your failures and how you corrected them, you aren’t necessarily ready for the job,” Sthapit said.

Understanding the kind of leader he wanted to be took time for Phillips. Throughout his career he’s observed other leaders and adapted the positive qualities and noted those he didn’t want to emulate.

Listening and incorporating different perspectives is key to his leadership style, making sure to have the voices of those the company serves represented on his team.

“In a previous job, I thought I knew everyone’s job, and it was my way or the highway,” Phillips said. “It was all about getting things done. I had to learn how to not be so obsessed with how to get the best idea but rather how to engage other people. You need to enter with humility, be willing to listen and not push your own agenda.”

He said the best test of yourself as a leader is to ask, “Do people run towards you or away from you?”

“Your personal brand is important: it is not what you say about yourself, but what others say about you,” Phillips said. “You build that brand through the work you do, by being a great teammate and by being the first person to dole out truths in a productive way.”