Bernard Girard explores Google's explosive growth and future prospects.
It happens millions of times a day.
A person is working on a computer. She wants information, but does not have the answer.
As Ray Parker, Jr. of Ghostbusters fame would ask, “Who’s she gonna call?”
The answer for people around the globe: Google.
Google’s domination of the search engine market and its seemingly endless stream of cool, new and free applications have become the stuff of Internet legend and an imbedded part of our culture. The very fact that the company name has become a verb is testament to its scope and influence.
Opinions about the company vary widely.
For some, the company’s global ambitions and power represent the possibility of an ominous and dangerous monopoly. For others, the company’s innovative management structure–Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt form a triumvirate-commitment to staff innovation and openness to customers are an international model worthy of study, if not replication.
Author Bernard Girard has followed the company for more than a decade and has written The Google Way: How One Company Is Revolutionizing Management As We Know It, a largely admiring, occasionally bracing look at Google’s origins, the elements that make it so successful and its future prospects.
As readers of Malcolm Gladwell’s most recent book, Outliers, know, timing matters.
What Gladwell talks about as circumstance, Girard describes as Brin and Page’s fortune to be starting the company during the dotcom boom of the 90s, when financial support for technological advances was flowing freely.
In the book’s opening section, Girard cites the founders’ “undeniable talent,” but goes on to discuss the American federal commitment to research and development and a brief look at pre-Google search engine efforts. That said, he notes with approval the founders’ decision to go public in a way that retained their independence.
The guts of the book focus on Google’s management techniques. Girard places the Mountain View giant within a tradition of management breakthroughs that includes Henry Ford and the creation of the Model T and Toyota’s implementation of quality control and continuous improvement.
Several elements lead to this success, including the automation of advertising, the cost-per-click advertising model, the hiring of highly intelligent and motivated people, the instruction for these employees to spend 20 percent of their time working on their own projects, the creation of small working teams, and a relentless practice of data analysis.
Most fundamentally, Girard argues, Google has also had a clear vision of continually aligning its products with the customer’s desires. In marked contrast with Microsoft, which forged a market but in some ways alienated users through its heaping on off little-used and memory-consuming applications in their operating system, Google continually draws on customer feedback and provides resources without charge to them.
The company’s metaphor for its vision: a Swiss Army Knife.
The book’s front cover has an picture of one, while the back cover contains a quote from Vice-President Marissa Mayer saying that Google should be like a Swiss Army Knife: “clean, simple, the tool you want to take everywhere.”
In many ways, the company has become that knife that Mayer described, but a host of challenges loom for the behemoth.
Among others, Girard discusses the difficulties of click fraud and spam, the possibility of conformity settling in as the company continues to grow, the global recession, privacy concerns, and potential cultural resistance to the company’s ongoing and seemingly unstoppable advances.
Girard discusses the company’s acquiescence to search limits by the Chinese government-a move that many said was endorsing censorship in the name of profit-and does credit the company’s leadership for discussing the issues openly and later admitting error.
To me, the most interesting was Girard’s description of the inherent challenge that nearly all companies working in this open-source era confront: that the very provision of the free products people love and come to expect at some point will impact the company’s ability to make money.
This may be the company’s ultimate undoing.
If it is to come, that downfall does not appear to be imminent, according to Girard.
He ends the book with both a cautiously optimistic if somewhat bland assessment of Google’s ability to weather the current economic storm and retool for the future as well as an endorsement of their customer-centered, employee-supporting, data-analyzing practices.
The Google Way is a brisk read with a clear structure, sense of history-some readers will smile at the section on Frederick Taylor, for example-and relatively clear-eyed assessment of the company’s strength and pitfalls. A stronger conclusion would have helped, and Girard’s statement that few other companies can replicate Google’s methods is a bit surprising, given that he has just spent more than 200 pages explaining them.
Still, whether in need of a Swiss Army Knife, the name of the artist who sang Ghostbusters, or the title of Girard’s book, Google is the destination of choice and readers will learn from this book.
What other search engines do you use besides Google?
Is the company becoming too unfocused or is it indeed on the path to world domination? If so, how long will its reign last?
Can Google’s management techniques be successfully exported?
