[UPDATE: Our interview with Kate Sweetman on leadership provides some additional insight on how companies like Google are "doing it." Oh, and thanks for the link(s), Glenn!]
How does Google do it? There are many different possible answers to that, of course, depending on which “it” you mean. But here’s a quote from former CEO Eric Schmidt, talking about talent management at Google, that really caught my attention:
“People are going to do what they are going to do, and you’re there to assist them. They don’t need me, they are going to do it anyway. They are going to do it for their whole lives. Maybe they could use a little help from me. At Google, we give the impression of not managing the company because we don’t really. It sort of has its own borg-like quality if you will. It sort of just moves forward.”
Well, that kind of goes to the whole “it,” now doesn’t it?
(BTW, I’m a little bummed to find this quote so soon after running my terminator-themed piece. I’d really like to include an appropriate photo, but if I put a Borg picture up here…well, some folks might begin to suspect that I’m some kind of nerd or something.)
Schmidt is describing an organization that exemplifies many of the most forward-thinking management values: empowerment, trust, engagement, alignment. And very much to his credit, he does it without using any of those buzzwords. (Not that buzzwords are always bad. There’s nothing wrong with talking about, say, transparency, for example.) People are going to do what they do. A company that can actually fill positions with people who actively want to do the things the job requires, who were going to perform those tasks anyway–that company has a tremendous advantage.
The “borg-like quality” is an emergent phenomenon. When an organization is that well designed, and when staff aptitude and capability are that closely matched with the tasks at hand, management really can step back and take facilitator role with day-to-day, and possibly even quarter-to-quarter priorities. This is where the need for leadership, distinct from management, becomes apparent. It takes leadership to so precisely define and align an organization to begin with, and to establish the kind of trust and individual responsibility that Schmidt is talking about.
It would be fair to ask whether Schmidt might be gilding the lily, and it would probably be fair to assume that he might, at least somewhat. We all know the importance of posturing, after all. But we also know what tremendous success Google has had over the years, and we know how eager people are to be a part of that success.
Another important question would be how applicable is the Google approach to other companies, or to companies in general? As I wrote not long ago:
A world in which each employee gets to pick his or her own job title and responsibilities is still a ways off. But a world in which employees have a more robust role in defining their value proposition within the company, where tools are in place which enable these employees to leverage their skills, education, and experience to the organization’s (and their own) best advantage…
That world isn’t so far off.
We’re not all going to be working for Google any time soon. But in the coming years, I think we will see companies take greater and greater strides towards becoming more “borg-like.” And that might be a surprisingly good thing.
What? Now how did that get here?
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A company usually does a face plant soon after an article like this.
Most of the Google employees in CA came from other high-tech startups. The culture you are referring to has not been uncommon at most of the successful Silicon Valley startups. I give credit to Google management for not interfering with that “get it done” work ethic and passion.
It’s going to take a generation or two for that to come to pass. Most current business leaders are very “hands on” and MBA programs are teaching the same thing so future business leaders will be “hands on”. It won’t be until the winderkinds that are heading companies like Google ensconce themselves as the elder statesmen and faculty educators that the tide in management style will change … slowly at that. By then we’ll all be dead.
Is that how they explain how they accidentally designed the Google street view cars with wifi antennas, accidentally wrote software to capture peoples data, accidentally stored that data, accidentally downloaded that data into a central repository? Just people doing whatever they wanted. Ah well, I guess that makes it ok.
My, my how times have changed. Over ten years ago I was on a vendor team that created Terminal Server at Microsoft. Our pet name for the big MS was “the Borg” – as a pejorative – not because of empowerment nor any other enabling buzzword but because the prime employee motivation was to conform to the behavioral requirements of the contentious, ego-driven mono-culture that was MS.
“Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.”
And now we are to believe that that’s a good thing ?
Google had an OK search engine when the world needed a functional search engine (Ask Jeeves was arguably better but VHS beat Betamax……..). Becoming the original search engine of choice for the web made Google big but not profitable. Against their original, idealistic policy, Page & Brin went for web ads as a revenue source. They made a bundle. But what is the combined ROI of every other investment they’ve made since? Quite probably negative. Are Brin and Page geniuses? Google’s stock price today is lower than it was in June 2007. Its stock exploded for the three years between August 2004 and October 2007 but has been flat for the succeeding three-and-a-half years.
Same with Microsoft: they did a couple of things really well (and also had good luck and timing): Windows and Office. These products became their cash cows. Ever since, the ROI of all their other investments combined is probably negative (their stock is at the same level today as June 1998, thirteen years ago). That didn’t stop people from assuming, during the company’s initial 12-13 year growth phase, that Microsoft in general, and Gates in particular, were geniuses.
Without knowing any of the details, I thought Google’s story was about what Peter Carroll said: make a ton of money off of one idea (the search engine) at the right place at the right time, then spend that money on interesting (but not profitable) stuff (i.e. google books, earth, etc).
In other words, I thought of Google as essentially a philanthropic organization (they are serving data to the world rather than food to orphans or poor mothers, though), that funds their philanthropy through that original search engine idea.
I tend to agree with Peter Carol’s understanding of Google, but I think that Mr. Schmidt is quite right about putting the right people in positions to succeed – and then getting out of the way. In my opinion, three conditions are required to create that kind of culture:
1) The production must be creatively intellectual in nature. For instance, this model would not work in manufacturing or law, because those fields are required to conform to third party quality specifications that are not necessarily contollable as part of the culture.
2) The leadership must be willing to trade control for success – which is extraordinarily hard for even strong leaders to do. The risk tolerance of that leadership must be very high, and some organizations must be risk-averse by nature, such as insurance, accounting, or law enforcement. Imagine a Police Chief of a major city saying, “Officers are going to do what they are going to do… They don’t need me, they are going to do it anyway…. They sort of have their own borg-like quality if you will. It sort of just moves forward.”
3) The enterprise must have ungodly amounts of cash – whether that comes from revenues or investors. Google can afford a culture like this because they had tons of investment before they had tremendous cash flow. A rather large failure at Google can be overcome by the even larger revenues they realize. A 300-person small business sitting on the edge of breakeven cannot afford the culture simply because the impact of failure in any given venture has a greater affect on the whole, and may negatively affect the company for years to come.
The questions then become othose of origin and scalability: Does the culture dictate the success or does the success dictate the culture? How does one duplicate that success in organization after organization?
Peter Ryan, exactly: much different thing to run Google than to run, say, a construction company or a hospital. Even within a single industry, there’s a giant difference between small and large examples of companies within that industry. In my own field, I run a small private preschool. I have a very close personal relationship with every single family in my school. The director of a large school cannot have the same kinds of relationships with every family – all he or she can do is to try to simulate the sense of those relationships, using “friendly” policies and (one hopes) excellent choices in staffing.
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