9 Remarkable Stats on Google
Seeking Alpha - New York,NY,USA
For something I’m working on, I compiled a bunch of stats on Google (sorry, I didn’t intend to blog it and so I didn’t capture all the links, but I found the collection so compelling I thought I’d share it):
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The accelerating impact of digital technology on how businesses are organized and managed is beyond question. E-mail, BlackBerries, instant messaging, blogs, Web conferencing and wikis are all part of the mix. Are these tools to jump-start innovation and collaboration, or mainly an always-on distraction?
There is a debate. Yet companies are increasingly embracing the new technology and habits, fostering a hurry-up workplace that has been called Enterprise 2.0.
Google, of course, is the iconic example. During a lengthy interview at the corporate campus, Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, touched on managing amid rapid technology change, among other subjects.
A few weeks later, he amplified his thoughts, in an e-mail message, to a question posed in the interview, “So what really is different now?” — Steve Lohr
What Is Really Different Now?
Eric Schmidt
December 2007
Google has developed a culture that reflects the unique ways people live today.
We know we can’t predict a future invention, but we can manage the innovation process. To do that we’ve done a few things:
First, we’ve updated portfolio theory: instead of pitting two internal teams against each other, we now wait until a new idea blossoms and then move forward. Second, we’ve adapted “trust but verify”; we’ve found that there is nothing like inspecting people’s work and the reality of their vision. And finally, we’ve identified that everyone and everything has a short attention span; we make decisions more quickly and use our culture and values to set the tone.
We’ve recognized, and now embrace, our biggest challenge — the changing nature of time. The relentless pace of technology improvement continues to make time management more and more critical for business leaders. While this has certainly long been true, the big difference now is the immediacy of information and action. Technology’s primary role has long been to speed up the transfer of information but now we increasingly contend with its unpleasant byproduct, information overload.
There are distinct consequences to this new age of “Instant Information.”
A) No falsehood can last. Everything can be and usually is checked, even as you are saying it. I remember during our I.P.O., a Google executive made a statement about the Sarbanes-Oxley rules that didn’t make sense to me. I checked the regulations while he was speaking and learned immediately that he was wrong. While I was clearly empowered by the instant information I had in front of me, I also faced a moral dilemma: correct and presumably embarrass him in front of his entire team or send him a private e-mail with the correction. (I chose the latter ... was I wrong?)
B) People expect an immediate answer. If you don’t answer almost immediately, they bombard you with queries. Why is it that they can define your time instead of you defining theirs? The traditional pyramid of power has been inverted by e-mail. At Google almost everyone is simultaneously in a group meeting and using their computers; what is rude to outsiders has become the norm in our culture. I worry that the need to answer immediately ultimately leads to less thoughtful decisions.
C) You can measure everything. At Google, we measure revenue, productivity, engineering. Every week our engineers post what they are working on as a way of allowing us to measure 70/20/10 time. One day Larry Page pointed out to me that the engineering management summary of our strategy and activities did not jibe with what the engineers were really working on. He had been reading the engineers’ weekly “snippets” of their activity and I had been listening to their managers. Larry’s point — and my mistake — offered me yet another lesson in the power of direct measurement.
D) Managers need new ways to listen to information and uncover the gems. These might include: transparency within the company, “best practices” where people are always suggesting better ways of doing things and 20-percent time so people are free to try out new ideas. Additionally, it’s important to realize that managers have traditionally been restrictors (of information) and access (to the boss). These days they need to become smart aggregators of such information and help spot the trends and issues in an information-overloaded world. You might say that you now have to “over-communicate” to get promoted.
E) Managers need to devise clever strategies to obtain everyone else’s information, even as they risk sinking in the proverbial sea of information. The best way I have found to effectively filter information for my own tastes and interests is the social graph, a method of representing the relationships between people in a given context. Even with that model, we still ask ourselves every day, how does the boss learn about a pure, new discovery or the development of a completely new idea or fact? Google has legions of associate product managers who search for everything new; how do we get all that information into one place?
Of course, many challenges and opportunities for managers and leaders are the same now as they were 50 years ago. The need for leadership, for hope, for a vision, for motivation are the same in every generation. In fact, you might even say the biggest difference in the workplace from 50 years ago is the presence of women and the lack of smoking in the office.
The bottom line is people everywhere want hope for the future and we want to be the engine of that hope. While this is surprising to existing managers, it’s more natural to our next generation. Just remember, when you see a teenager walking down the street in baggy pants and the iPod, remember that he or she could be your next boss.
