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Case StudyGoogle

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Case StudyGoogle

1

Culture and Collaboration Drive Innovation

“At lunchtime, almost everyone eats in the office café, sitting at whatever table has an opening and enjoying conversations with Googlers from different teams. Our commitment to innovation depends on everyone being comfortable sharing ideas and opinions. Every employee is a hands-on contributor, and everyone wears several hats. Because we believe that each Googler is an equally important part of our success, no one hesitates to pose questions directly to Larry or Sergey in our weekly all-hands (‘TGIF’)

meetings—or spike a volleyball across the net at a corporate officer.”— Isa Notermans, former Talent Programs Manager at Google1

When Google launched in 1998, its core competency was search. Only a decade later, it had expanded to email, maps, entertainment, translation, smartphones, and a project to scan every book ever written. Today, the organization is known as Alphabet, a multinational conglomerate that serves as the parent company for Google and other companies previously owned by or tied to Google. Alphabet’s main business line, Google, has continued to drive tremendous growth and success over the last decade, largely attributed to the democratic nature of its operations. Google isn’t a company of managers, C-suites, and hierarchy; it’s a surprisingly flat organization where even junior employees are given the freedom and resources to create and innovate.

Google’s internal innovation efforts are supplemented by ongoing, strategic acquisitions that allow it to evolve. It is known for maintaining the energy of a start-up company while facilitating trillions of searches annually and employing more than 80,000 people in over 100 offices all across the world.2;3

A culture of openness and transparency is very much a part of what makes Google tick. According to Doug Merrill, Google’s former CIO and VP of Engineering:

We need a stubborn rebellious attitude in order to innovate. How do you encourage that? It’s a tricky balance. We have to walk the line between anarchy and absolute focus on Six Sigma efficiency. There are no pat answers to describe how to balance that contradiction. I need a process where the culture self-regulates and balances these things out.4

Even as a massive conglomerate, Google manages to innovate with the kind of dexterity and creativity not even possessed by most startups.5 Alphabet ranked No. 8 on Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Companies 2016” and No. 1 on Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For In 2016” for the eighth time in eleven years.6;7 It was also named “Tech Brand of the Year” at the TrustedReviews Awards 2016.8 Read on to learn how you can apply Google’s innovative practices to your own organization.

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The Four Innovation Capabilitiesfuturethink’s Innovation Case Studies are designed to provide insights on today’s leading innovators. Information about each of the companies we feature covers the four key innovation capabilities: Strategy, Ideas, Process, and Climate.

Set a foundation that defines innovation objectives and mobilizes your efforts. The notion of “serendipitous innovation” is dangerously outdated. The secret to success lies in crafting an action-oriented strategy. It means setting a vision for your company to follow and viewing innovation as an expected result, not a lucky one. Innovation should be handled like any business initiative: with an eye on growth, results, and profit.

Think differently to develop original ideas that drive business value. In today’s economy, the ability to continually fuel innovation is what separates winning organizations from the rest. Idea generation should be managed, purposeful, and clearly linked to business objectives. Leading innovators succeed by balancing out-of-the-box thinking with sound management principles.

Create a streamlined and flexible approach to shepherd innovative ideas to market. The reality in every organization is that money is limited. To make sure you’re spending effectively, you must have a streamlined process for innovation. A good process will help to consistently identify your best projects and enable you to move them forward more efficiently.

Build a thriving work environment that drives innovation across your organization. We live in a world where the new replaces the old very quickly. Only organizations that keep pace with the shifting marketplace will be able to stay ahead. So how do the best companies adapt? They cultivate a climate in which employees are encouraged to innovate in a continuous and consistent manner. The companies that stay ahead have made innovation part of their DNA.

futurethink analysts develop case studies by drawing from a mix of extensive research, organizational and customer interviews, and firsthand interactions with the organization. Many thanks to the individuals who contributed to this case study and deepened our understanding of Google’s innovation process.

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A Culture of Innovation While the word “innovation” is often mentioned in the mission statements or core values of other organizations, Google actually outlines its innovation approach in a statement called “Google’s 9 Principles of Innovation.”

1. A healthy disregard for the impossible

2. Innovation, not instant perfection

3. Focus on the user

4. Share everything you can

5. Ideas come from everywhere

6. Data, not opinions

7. You’re brilliant, we’re hiring!

8. Invest in and grow talent

9. Give people a license to pursue dreams9

While Google understands that “innovation cannot be ordained,” it strives to “create an environment in which it will evolve organically.”9

They Wrote the Book on Innovation. In 2014, Alphabet’s Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt and early senior leader Jonathan Rosenberg wrote How Google Works, a book detailing how the company scales its innovation culture. The authors explain how technology has shifted the balance of power from companies to consumers, and that the only way to succeed in this landscape is to create superior products and attract a particular breed of employees called Smart Creatives.10

Exile Knaves and Promote Divas. The book posits that Google’s most successful teams are small—and often contain character types dubbed as “knaves” and “divas.” Knaves are smart, fallible people who might deceive others, shirk responsibility, or take credit for someone else’s work. They also lack integrity and can bring down teams with their jealousy. Divas are smart people who display high exceptionalism but sometimes exhibit attention-seeking diva tendencies. Google’s approach to managing teams of Smart Creatives is to “fight for the divas and exile the knaves.”10

Keeping the Spirit of a Start-Up. Despite growing into a conglomerate, Google is committed to preserving its roots as a Silicon Valley start-up. It still subscribes to the premise that innovation comes from anywhere, and exemplifies this by funding risky “moonshot” projects and creating an incubator program where engineers are granted time to work on ideas unrelated to their job responsibilities. Like a typical start-up, it experiments with many product-development projects at one time. To manage this, it creates small, nimble teams to run innovation projects. New teams of three to four people are constantly created to allow for quick changes in direction. They are disassembled after three to six months if the project shows no potential.

When Google was just a small company with less than 20 employees, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin would huddle the team together every Friday. Over beers and snacks, they would check in with everyone about how things were going, provide updates, answer questions, and introducing new hires (usually accompanied by a fun fact about each of them).11

As Google has grown, TGIF meetings remain essential to its culture of openness, trust, collaboration, and innovation. The hour-long meeting features a transparent presentation of goals, plans, and product roadmaps; as well as failed initiatives, activities in various parts of the company; and an open mic Q&A in which anyone can ask questions of the senior leadership team.11

Externally, the company runs Google for Entrepreneurs, which has built campuses in six countries that are free to anyone in the startup community.12 From Brazil to South Korea, entrepreneurs can network, attend classes, and collaborate with mentors to help their startups grow.13

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Work Hard, Play Harder. Google is serious about its mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”14 To achieve this, Google outlines to employees which projects are top priorities, and it tasks each Google employee with doing something to change the world. How and what they do is up to them, but many prospective hires are asked: “If you could change the world using Google’s resources, what would you build?”15

Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California—the Googleplex—has been called one of the most luxurious workspaces in corporate America. From the open work plans to the cube assignments that change every few weeks when teams are reassigned, every aspect of the space has been designed to foster collaboration and openness.

The free-food policy, through which Google employees are entitled to gourmet meals at multiple onsite cafés and micro-kitchens, allows employees to take a break whenever they’re hungry. Colorful Google bikes appear all around the campus so employees can ride to meetings. Googlers also have onsite access to fitness centers, drycleaners, game rooms, childcare, nap pods, a yoga studio, and even a bowling alley and sculpture garden.16 These spaces not only keep employees healthy, inspired, and onsite—they’re designed to maximize chance encounters. According to Dan Cobley, a former UK managing director, Google’s meal-time lines are intentionally kept long, “because we know people will chat while they’re waiting. Chats become ideas, and ideas become projects.”17

The 70/20/10 Rule. Known as “Sergey’s Resource Allocation Rule” and the “70/20/10 rule,” it communicates management’s top priorities to employees and mandates that employees spend:

• 70% of time on the core business

• 20% on related projects

• 10% on unrelated new business18

Google dedicates 70 percent of resources to its core businesses of search (quality, crawl systems, indexing), advertising (AdWords & AdSense), and applications (GoogleApps). Twenty percent of resources are allocated to “Strong Potential” projects such as Blogger, Google News, and Chrome—all of which represent adjacent businesses that are very popular in the marketplace. The company devotes the remaining 10 percent of resources to “Other Bets.” These are known as moonshots, which are truly novel projects like Google Glass and Project Loon—a network of balloons on the edge of space designed to connect people in remote areas with Internet access.19 By definition, moonshots are lofty goals with high risk—as seen in 2016, when Alphabet lost $1.1 billion on moonshots in a single quarter.20

20 Percent Time. Every Google engineer and project manager is granted “20 Percent Time” to work on side projects that may be completely unrelated to day-to-day work. The reasoning is that knowledge workers are most valuable when granted protected space in which to tinker with ideas. Twenty Percent Time (formerly called “Googlettes”) is not a fully fleshed-out policy with written guidelines. It operates on a somewhat ad hoc basis, providing an outlet for the company’s brightest, most restless, and most persistent employees. It’s also an incubator system, allowing mini-startups to grow inside the company. Case in point is Engineer Paul Buchheit, who used his Twenty Percent Time to create Gmail.21

Losing $1.1 billion in a single quarter on moonshots demonstrates Google’s

commitment—and ability—to take risks.

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While a formal policy for Twenty Percent Time isn’t in place, leadership is mandated to respect it. Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt explains:

Innovation has…always been a small team of people who have a new idea, typically not understood by people around them. [Twenty Percent Time] is a systematic way of making sure a middle manager does not eliminate that innovation. If you’re the employee and I’m the manager, and I sit down and say, ‘Our product’s late, and you screwed up, and you’ve got to work on this really hard,’ you can legally say to me, ‘I will give you everything I’ve got: 80 percent of my time.’ It means the managers can’t screw around with the employees beyond some limit. I believe that this innovation escape-valve model is applicable to essentially every business that has technology as a component.22

OKRs and 10x Thinking. In its first year, Google debuted OKRs—objectives and key results—to track quarterly progress toward its goals. Employees determine their own OKRs, which are usually ambitious and uncomfortable, and all members of the Google community can view them. Some objectives remain in place for years, while others change every quarter, but the cardinal rule of OKRs is that they’re measurable. A sales OKR, for instance, might be to hit a certain revenue target within the quarter. Marketers might set a benchmark for qualified leads, while HR could plan to hire a particular number of engineers within the quarter.23

OKRs help prioritize efforts and align individuals and teams with Google’s objectives. Additionally, OKRs push the organization toward 10x thinking—a philosophy that’s woven into Google’s DNA. Instead of improving something by 10%, the company strives to work on projects that are 10 times better than anything else out there. It challenges employees to think about everything they do in terms of revolutionary change rather than evolutionary change.23

Freedom through Tracking. Executive chairman Eric Schmidt has been known to tell an employee that he or she can “do whatever you want as long as you track it.”24 The company’s tracking system is known as Google

Snippets, which allows individual engineers to manage themselves and manage each other without having to go through a middleman. 25

By tracking project progress and managing employees via hands-off systems such as Snippets, Google ensures that projects are on track, and managers can intervene in a timely manner if necessary. Google Snippets works because it’s minimally disruptive to employee flow, and enables for large blocks of time dedicated to concentrated progress on work—rather than breaking up an engineer’s day into a manager’s schedule to suit a manager’s needs.25 This means that managers aren’t spending time managing projects that don’t need to be managed, and employees aren’t wasting time providing updates and sitting in meetings solely for the purposes of bringing managers up to speed.

It’s Okay to Fail. Really. Google believes there shouldn’t be stigma attached to failure, and if you aren’t failing often, you’re not trying hard enough. Once a product or project fails to reach its potential, it is axed, but the company often repurposes the best of its technology to other products. “Failure is actually a badge of honor,” says Gopi Kallayil, Chief Brand Evangelist at Google. “Failure is the way to be innovative and successful. You can fail with pride.”26

Google’s policy of celebrating failures is not only supported by the leadership team, it’s often celebrated with bonuses, high-fives, hugs from managers, and promotions.27

According to Astro Teller, who directs the Google X Lab: “The biggest rate-limiting factor to innovation is the inability to kill projects.”27

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For example, very few people outside of Google have ever heard of the Automated Vertical Farming project. That’s because it withered on the vine in 2016 after it attempted to solve malnutrition issues related to water, land, and food transportation costs. While vertical farming requires 10 times less water and 100 times less land than conventional farming, the endeavor was killed because teams weren’t able to grow staple crops like rice and grains—only lettuce.27

Director of Research Peter Norvig believes that Google’s failures are simply a byproduct of its rapid development model:

We [try] to fail faster and smaller. The average cycle for getting something done at Google is more like three months than three years. And the average team size is small, so if we have a new idea, we don’t have to go through the political lobbying of saying, ‘Can we have 50 people to work on this?’ Instead, it’s more done bottom-up: Two or three people get together and say, ‘Hey, I want to work on this.’ They don’t need permission from the top level to get it started because it’s just a couple of people; it’s kind of off the books.28

Code Jams. Google Code Jam is an annual, international programming competition hosted and administered by Google. It began in 2003 as a means to identify top engineering talent for potential employment at Google, and consists of a set of algorithmic problems that must be solved in a fixed amount of time. In 2016, over 27,000 people representing 130 countries participated in the timed challenge to solve complex algorithmic problems.29

Idea ManagementIn order to support the sharing and development of ideas throughout the company, Google enables employees to collaborate through various internal Web-based platforms. The Intranet-based information management system is, much like the Web itself, searchable, taggable, sortable, and infinitely useful for managers and employees alike.

Google Ideas. Google keeps its idea pipeline full by maintaining an active, dynamic database of ideas

that come from employees around the world. Any employee can log into the database and submit a short description of a new idea. Only basic information is needed at this stage, such as which group might be responsible, customer need, required capabilities, etc. Each submission is visible to Google employees, who comment, critique, and vote on individual ideas. The ideas are then organized by popularity—those at the top of the list have received the most feedback—and managers can mobilize teams to explore the ideas.

When an employee submits an idea, he or she is credited within Google Ideas and on his or her Google profile page. Every employee’s page contains his or her submissions, comments, votes, interests, and other information. Part of an employee’s success at Google is connected to his or her level of activity and involvement—and everyone at Google can see everyone else’s stats. The incentive to contribute and take part in innovation is driven from the bottom-up.

“I went to a staff meeting [the] afternoon [I was hired] and

got assigned to figure out how Google could launch Enterprise

[applications for corporations] in Europe. I was told to come back with the answer at the end of

the week. It was like, ‘Hey, New Guy, you don’t know anything

about our business yet, and you don’t have any international

experience, but here are some people who can help you. Go figure it out.’ We launched in Europe a few months later.”

—Matt Glotzbach, former VP of Product Management for YouTube30

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Moma. With a 75 percent share of the search engine market, it’s fitting that Google leverages its search capabilities for its own people.31 Moma is Google’s Intranet—a Wikipedia-style database for people, projects, ideas, as well as info on available conference rooms, lunch recommendations, the employee handbook, and time cards. Employees utilize Moma hundreds of times each day instead of interrupting one another with calls, emails, or IMs. Looking for an expert on mapping software? Type your query into Moma for a list of everyone at Google with mapping experience. Forgot what SQL means? The definition will pop up along with suggested resources to visit.

GVC. To keep globally dispersed employees connected, teams use Google Video Conferences (GVCs), an internal version of Google Hangouts. Instead of conference phones, Google meeting rooms are equipped with GVC monitors. Participants meet virtually and can easily share their computer screens to present or collaborate on a project. Google’s use of GVC reduces travel costs for dispersed employees while supporting clear communication and collaboration.

Forget the RulebookOutsider Perspectives. Another factor in Google’s suc-cess has been its ability to attract and retain outside perspectives. While Google is a technology company, non-technologists provide the company with much-needed feedback on user experience, new ideas, and management.

Former CEO of Google’s YouTube brand Salar Kamangar assembled an experienced team of people he could let loose on assignments and who could incorporate and capitalize on an outsider perspective. His senior team

included many non-engineers, including Kamangar himself, who was a pre-med major before joining Google upon graduation. According to Kamangar, “Like search, video needs a business model that’s unique to video.”33

Kamangar, now SVP of YouTube and Video, hopes his dream team will bring a fresh perspective to solving YouTube’s most pressing problem: a sustainable business model.34

The 2012 addition of author and futurist Ray Kurzweil embodies Google’s open-minded talent acquisition strategy. Kurzweil was the principal inventor of the first CCD flat-bed scanner; the first omni-font optical character recognition; and the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, among others.35 Widely known for his theories about “The Singularity”—the point at which artificial intelligence matches human intelligence—Kurzweil was hired to work on new projects involving machine learning and language processing.36

Public Experimentation. In spring of 2010, Google thrilled Americans when it announced an experimental trial of its new ultra-high-speed fiber network. Two years later, Google Fiber launched in Kansas City, and has since expanded to 10 more U.S. cities. The current number of cities is far fewer than Google predicted, and some journalists have speculated that Fiber was largely a symbolic project meant to shame the biggest ISPs into offering faster Internet speeds, thus creating an environment of lightning-fast Internet that Google could service with products like Search and YouTube.37

By summer 2017, Google Fiber (now housed under Access, a subsidiary of Alphabet) faced staffing cuts—including two departing CEOs in one year—and plans to expand to more cities are on hold indefinitely.37 Google Fiber began as an experiment, then briefly seemed poised to grow into a legitimate contender against the ISP incumbents. But today it seems to indicate that providing high-speed wired Internet isn’t necessarily a winning proposition—even for one of the world’s wealthiest companies.

“Nearly everyone has access to user feedback, we all know what

the problem areas are, where users are complaining.”—Monika Henzinger, Former Director of Research32

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Build, Buy or ‘Acqui-hire?’ Another aspect of Google’s growth strategy is acquisitions, and the company has accelerated and diversified its acquisitions in recent years. In 2016, Google had 17 new acquisitions, specifically investing in companies that will grow their cloud-computing services. Since hiring Diane Greene in late 2015 to run Google’s cloud and enterprise business, acquisitions in that category have increased to keep up with enterprise titans like Microsoft and Amazon.38

Some acquisitions come with steep price tags—like the $625M deal for Apigee, an enterprise API management company that will work as a bridge for Google’s developer community and cloud platform.39 Other acquisitions appear to be a defensive strategy to keep talent away from their competitors. In 2014, it paid more than $500 million for UK-based DeepMind.40 This AI-focused company was viewed as an “acqui-hire” strategy in which Google purchased the company for its human talent rather than product portfolio.

Thus far, Google’s strategy of acquiring both start-ups and established organizations has enabled it to maintain its edge in a fiercely competitive industry.

Create the FutureMany of Google’s “Other Bets” started as ideas inside Google’s X Lab, which is now known as Alphabet X or simply “X.” The lab is located 1.5 miles from the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, and doesn’t employ the usual Silicon Valley types. Its employees have included former park rangers, sculptors, philosophers, machinists, and even an Academy Award winner.41 Within this seemingly haphazard arrangement of intellect is Google’s best hope for creating products that can solve the world’s most intractable issues.41

Alphabet X Lab. Work at X is overseen by entrepreneur scientist Astro Teller, whose actual job title is “Captain of Moonshots,” and its mission is to invent and launch moonshot technologies that it “hopes could someday make the world a radically better place.”42

The lab began in 2010 with the development of Google’s Self-Driving Car Project (now known as Waymo) and it’s where projects like Verily smart contact lenses

and Google Glass originated. While consumers didn’t embrace Google Glass when it launched in 2013, the product was relaunched in 2016 to serve industries like healthcare and manufacturing, allowing professionals to see information through their lens while still using their hands for work.43

In 2016, Alphabet spun off Waymo (which stands for “a new way forward in mobility”) as an individual company.44 At its helm is John Krafcik, who served as president of True Car Inc. and CEO of Hyundai Motor America. Waymo’s autonomous vehicles have driven three million miles on public roads and billions of simulated miles.45;46 In spring 2017, its first public self-driving pilot launched in Arizona, opening up applications to people who would use the autonomous cars every day.46

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The race to autonomy is tight with top tech leaders like Tesla, Apple, Microsoft, and BMW all vying for a piece of what will likely be a massive disruption in the automotive industry. Driverless technology will have the ability to revolutionize human lives around the world, and analysts have estimated the global autonomous car industry to be worth over $80 billion by 2035.47 By dedicating resources to big risks like Waymo, Google increases its likelihood of being at the forefront of the driverless revolution.

Another major project out of X is Project Loon, which aims to extend Internet access in remote areas by using weather balloons. When it was announced in 2013, the idea that helium-filled balloons flying 60,000 feet in the air would transmit high-speed Internet signals to parts of the world with no connectivity may have seemed far-fetched. But since Loon’s inception, the project has progressed—fewer balloons are now needed to achieve connectivity, for example—through observation, experimentation, and algorithms.48

“By early 2016, the team was seeing a few balloons behave in a slightly weird way: lingering in an area rather than sailing away. In the weirdness, they saw opportunity. They asked

themselves the once-impossible question: could our algorithms help the balloons to stay much closer to the location they were

already in?”—Astro Teller, Captain of Moonshots at X49

Now, Project Loon is programming the balloons to hover in clusters over regions without Internet access, as opposed to continually floating around the globe. While years of testing are ahead, the initiative is a signal of Google’s commitment not only to innovation, but to using its enormous resources for more than just commercial interest.50

In 2015, Alphabet announced Sidewalk Labs, a start-up that “imagines, designs, tests, and builds urban innovations to help cities meet their biggest challenges.”51 Headed by Daniel L. Doctoroff, former deputy mayor of New York City for economic development, Sidewalk is focused on using technology to solve issues like crumbling infrastructure, rising rents, and stagnant wages.51 Informing its mission and its projects is this thought experiment: What would a city look like if you started from scratch in the Internet era—if you built a city “from the Internet up?”51

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In conjunction with a subsidiary called Intersection, Sidewalk’s first product was LinkNYC, which is turning 7,500 old public pay phones into kiosks that deliver free Wi-Fi, video and voice calling, smartphone charging, and access to emergency and other city services across New York City.52

Sidewalk has also partnered with the national advocacy group Transportation for America, which ensure that states and the federal government invest in smart, homegrown, locally driven transportation solutions.53 The two organizations will work with dozens of U.S. cities to define how technology can help them meet their pressing transportation challenges. Through the partnership, T4A will launch an in-depth study on the state of current transportation policy and technology in American cities, and build a peer-learning collaborative of city leaders to define and design the connected streets of the future.53

What’s Next for Google?Corporate reshaping under Alphabet has allowed Google projects to grow into individual companies, giving them room to grow through leadership, investment, and business strategy. According to Alphabet, its restructuring will make its businesses more transparent than before. From its FCC filing on Sept. 1, 2017:

“As a result of the corporate reorganization, Alphabet and Google will be able to operate in a more efficient, economical, and transparent manner, allowing the companies to concentrate on their revenue generating activities.”54

Between Google’s open-ended mission to organize the world’s information and its presence in industries outside the search category, the company is poised for pursuits of the futuristic kind. Curing death? Scientists at Google’s Calico are on it. Drones for package delivery? The geniuses at Project Wing are making it a reality. Smart contact lenses for diabetes detection? The folks at Google’s Verily are enabling it.55

As the world now looks to Google for offline answers, Google is seeking environmentally sustainable solutions. Project Energy started as a plan to use wind turbines—flown like kites up to 1,950 feet in the air—to gather and transfer energy to Earth through conductive tether. In 2013, Project Energy became Makani, and its energy kites now create 50 percent more energy than a traditional wind turbine, while using 90 percent less materials.56

Other environmental initiatives include Project Sunroof, which uses Google Maps and Google Earth to calculate how much sunlight is received by each household in America and analyze its potential for generating solar energy in all 50 states.57 Moving forward, expect a mix of eco-centered projects like these and market-driven innovations out of Google.

Among the company’s current and compelling initiatives is Project Lunar, a competition that incentivizes private moon exploration.58 Google News Lab University provides journalism schools in America with tools to combat fake news.59 The Google Science Journal app turns your smartphone into a research lab by using sensors to measure and record data in real time, including movement, light, and sound.60 The Chrome Music Lab website allows users to experiment with visual representations of sound and music.61 And Google Home is a smart speaker and digital assistant that plays music, sets calendar alerts and reminders, and delivers answers to burning questions like “how far

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away is the moon from Earth?” (238,900 miles) and “do swans really sing just before they die?” (nope, that’s a myth.)62

While Google Home easily answers those types of questions, the company itself has encountered difficult questions regarding its diversity policy. In summer 2017, Google engineer James Damore wrote and shared a memo on Gizmodo.com after he attended a Google program on diversity. Damore claimed that Google’s approach to diversity was formed by political bias and was an “ideological echo chamber,” where policies could not be questioned.63 It also hypothesized that the under-representation of women in tech and leadership roles is the result of “biological differences” between males and females.63

Between Damore’s controversial gender assertions and Google’s public image as a supposedly welcome home for outsider perspectives, the memo created a media firestorm. In response to the backlash, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that parts of the memo “[advanced] harmful gender stereotypes” and he fired Damore for allegedly violating the company’s code of conduct.63 Public opinion over the firing is divided, but the content of the memo has ramped up dialogue about the culture in Silicon Valley. Inclusion, discrimination, and echo chambers may not be as exciting as autonomous cars or energy kites, but Google will have to solve for these issues in order to continue attracting top talent and remain beloved to consumers.

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What Can You Learn from Google?Set a foundation that defines innovation objectives and mobilizes your efforts.Innovation at Google is about discovering new ways to change the world using an established set of tools and competencies.

• What are the guiding principles that define innovation for your organization?

• Do any of your organizational goals inspire people both inside and outside your walls? If not, start formulating one below.

Think differently to develop original ideas that drive business value. No idea is impossible at Google; and through its Intranet, the company tracks the status and development of every idea submitted by employees.

• What fundamental driving forces and paradigm shifts (social, technological, political, economic, and environmental) should your organization address today to succeed tomorrow?

• Which external partners can you leverage to create new ideas faster or lend expertise or resources to innovation projects?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Create a streamlined and flexible approach to shepherd innovative ideas to market. To keep its innovation process efficient and energized, employees are expected to launch new products quickly and assigned to projects on a short-term basis.

• Is the innovation process in your organization streamlined? What changes could be made to simplify and strengthen it?

• How can you better empower employees so that they’re not killing good ideas too early?

• How can you better use your Intranet and other internal tools to increase collaboration?

Build a thriving work environment that drives innovation across your organization. Google’s culture is open, transparent, rebellious, and free—but employees know that they’re held to strict standards of quality and innovation. Innovation is everyone’s job and failures are encouraged and celebrated.

• How do you maintain employee engagement in innovation projects?

• How do you share innovation successes and failures with the rest of the organization so everyone can learn from each other?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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BIBLIOGRAPHY1 NZCSRSC. “An Interview with Google.” NZCSRSC.blogspot.com. http://nzcsrsc.blogspot.com/2010/02/interview-with-google.html (accessed September 6, 2017).

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