money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/10/02/8387489 -> money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/10/02/8387489/
Charts), age 8, is pulling in $10 billion a year in revenue and is worth about $125 billion, but the vibe is far more freshman mixer than profit-seeking firm whose every utterance is scrutinized for deeper meaning. The 13-million-square-foot headquarters is a mlange of two-story buildings full of festive cafeterias (yes, they're all free), crammed conference rooms, and hallway bull sessions, all of it surrounded by sandy volleyball courts, youngsters whizzing by on motorized scooters, and -- there's no better way to put this -- an anything-goes spirit. It's a place where failure coexists with triumph, and ideas bubble up from lightly supervised engineers, none of whom worry too much about their projects ever making money. jpg Brownian Motion: Google is Shona Brown's $125 billion "ultimate petri dish." jpg Golden: Armstrong dismisses skeptics who say Google got taken in its $900 million ad deal with MySpace.
more) The World According To The Chief Chaos Officer Shona Brown co-wrote "Competing on the Edge" in 1998, the year Google was founded. Pace Yourself The goal should be creating an internal rhythm, not just moving fast for the sake of speed. Hang Loose Encourage an innovative, adaptive culture, but avoid having too little structure. Still, too much structure -- the "bureaucratic trap" -- means death for a fast-moving company. Play Nice A common cause of poor collaboration is the "star trap," when the company's big moneymaker doesn't share know-how or ideas with everyone else. Three ways Tim Armstrong, Google's VP for advertising sales, is trying to expand the moneymaking part of Google. Go Big Google became a phenomenon by selling text ads a few dollars at a time. Print It Newspapers and magazines view Google as the ultimate threat, which is why Armstrong wants to help them sell ads online. Hit the Airwaves Google recently bought dMarc Broadcasting, which brokers radio ads. When dMarc morphs into Google Audio Ads this fall, Google will be pitching radio time to its advertisers. Take the case of Sheryl Sandberg, a 37-year-old vice president whose fiefdom includes the company's automated advertising system. Sandberg recently committed an error that cost Google several million dollars -- "Bad decision, moved too quickly, no controls in place, wasted some money," is all she'll say about it -- and when she realized the magnitude of her mistake, she walked across the street to inform Larry Page, Google's co-founder and unofficial thought leader. "God, I feel really bad about this," Sandberg told Page, who accepted her apology. But as she turned to leave, Page said something that surprised her. "Because I want to run a company where we are moving too quickly and doing too much, not being too cautious and doing too little. If we don't have any of these mistakes, we're just not taking enough risk." When a million-dollar mistake earns a pat on the back, it's obvious this isn't your normal corporation. To figure the place out, I've repeatedly been told the person to see is Shona Brown, the 40-year-old ex-McKinsey consultant who is Google's senior vice president for business operations. That's what it says on her business card, anyway, but she might as well be Google's chief chaos officer. She literally wrote the book on the subject, a 1998 bestseller called "Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos." And fittingly, on the day I'm to see her at the Googleplex, my press escort and I get hopelessly lost. Finding anyone here requires precise navigation and the ability to read color-coded maps. We get so badly turned around -- entering the wrong building's lobby, backtracking through shrubbery to another -- that we arrive 17 minutes late.
Click here to read more on Google's leadership Brown has made a career of arguing that anarchy isn't such a bad thing -- which is why Page, co-founder Sergey Brin, and CEO Eric Schmidt hired her in 2003. A business theoretician in a company dominated by engineers, she considers Google the "ultimate petri dish" for her research, though her job is anything but theoretical. In addition to overseeing human resources (called "people operations"), Brown runs a SWAT team of 25 strategic consultants who are loaned out internally on ten or so projects at a time -- restructuring a regional sales force here, guesstimating a market size there. The company's goal, says Brown, is to determine precisely the amount of management it needs -- and then use a little bit less. It's an almost laughably Goldilocksian approach that Brown also advocates in her book, co-written with a Stanford business professor. The way to succeed in "fast-paced, ambiguous situations," she tells me, is to avoid creating too much structure, but not to add too little either. In other words, just make it not too hot and not too cold, and you're done. "If I ever come into the office and I feel comfortable, if I don't feel a little nervous about some crazy stuff going on, then we've taken it too far," she says. A "Googley" approach to business Crazy definitely trumps comfy at Google. You have to keep your wits about you on campus just to avoid smashing into one of Google's 8,000-plus employees. Meetings typically start on the hour, and young Googlers tend to hover outside scarce conference rooms beforehand. They doodle on hallway whiteboards, contributing inside jokes, such as sinister new ways to expand the company's online advertising program. A couple of years ago I was having lunch at Google's sunny outdoor courtyard when Page and Brin sat down at my table with their guest, comedian Chris Tucker. Nurturing such an off-the-wall culture is a luxury only a company that's performing stupendously well can afford, and Google is certainly doing that. Two years after going public, its stock is up more than fourfold, and it's so profitable that despite helter-skelter spending on everything from mammoth data centers to worldwide sales and engineering offices, Google is generating more than $800 million in cash each quarter.
If Google's engine is running fast, then naturally it's also running hot. That sheds light on all kinds of blunders -- many of them dwarfing Sandberg's -- which Google likes to explain away as its Googley approach to business. Its new products haven't made nearly the splash that its original search engine did. Critics have mocked its self-righteous "Don't be evil" motto when, for example, Google decided to scan copyrighted books for its book search index. Even Google's rocket-ship stock price has been grounded. After a run from $85 in August 2004 to $475 last January, it has puttered around $400 for most of the year. Says Benjamin Schachter, an analyst with UBS: "Investors are saying, 'Enough of what you're going to do. There's nothing to suggest that its growth engine -- ad-supported search -- is in trouble. But it's clear from Google's tentative lurches into new forms of advertising and its spaghetti method of product development (toss against wall, see if sticks) that the company is searching for ways to grow beyond that well-run core. It's the reason, for example, that Google requires all engineers to spend 20% of their time pursuing their own ideas. Successful second acts are exceedingly rare in the technology business -- or in any business, for that matter. Intel jettisoned its memory-chip line to rule microprocessors. Even Apple, which executed one of the most remarkable rebirths ever with the iPod, had to go through a painful decade to get there. What emerges from months of interviews with employees ranging from fresh-out-of-college hires to the CEO is that Google firmly believes it has a framework for figuring out the future. It should come as no surprise that the plan is as irreverent, self-confident, and presumptuous as the company itself. Google's executives don't articulate it this way, but the framework can be found in the title of Shona Brown's book: structured chaos. Indeed, along with Googleyness, chaos is among the most important aspects of Google's self-image. Understanding how Google thinks about chaos -- like Page's teachable moment after Sandberg's million-dollar mistake -- is critical to divining where the comp...
|
http://csua.com/feed/