Editors' Rating
Published: 19 May 2009
History is not only written by the winners; it's usually written about the winners. In fact — although people often forget this — Google is too young a company for anyone to tell reliably whether people will still be talking about it in such glowing terms when it's as old as IBM, Hewlett-Packard or even Microsoft. Xerox, AT&T and AOL were all fabulous companies in their day. But for the purposes of 'how-to-succeed-in-business' books in 2009, Google will do until something better comes along.
Bernard Girard, a management consultant, author and lecturer, accordingly fills the beginning of The Google Way: How One Company Is Revolutionizing Management As We Know It with reminders of how Google got to its present position, which appears to be on the verge of world domination.
First Sergey Brin and Larry Page invented Page Rank; then they did a clever joint venture capital deal; then they invented AdSense; then they and Eric Schmidt did a Dutch auction IPO instead of a normal one, and had a triumvirate running the company instead of a single CEO — and on and on about the maverick style of the Google Invention. Don't forget the 20 percent of work time employees are encouraged to spend on their own projects (that will hopefully become new product ideas), or the various companies Google has acquired. And, says Girard, Google is unusual in using peer review to determine which research avenues to follow, rather than a management structure.
There is less coverage than you might expect of the controversies surrounding Google. There is a brief discussion of privacy issues and trust, in which Girard notes the differing approaches to personal data of the US and Europe. There is a brief explanation of the way copyright laws impede Google's growth into video — a claim for which Girard's evidence seems to be that in 2007 only 39 percent of US internet users approached the task of finding video by using a search engine. And Girard talks about the difficulties of working in international markets such as China. Other challenges also make brief appearances: the perennial difficulty of dealing with spam and the current problem of a shrinking advertising market in a global downturn.
But where Google seems most vulnerable is in a rather geeky style of blindness that Girard doesn't discuss. The company seemed unprepared for the UK's outcry over StreetView despite previous similar complaints in the US. Its Google Books inspired publishers to sue. This apparently endemic lack of foresight may be a bigger problem for the company than the issues Girard does discuss, such as what it would mean if the company began charging for its services.
There's no doubt that Google is an innovative company. But can the company go on insisting that all technical staff have graduate degrees as it gets bigger and the value of stock options declines, the way it has at Microsoft? Is its success really due to management style or to its technology and timing? Can it really be sensible to say that a company has reinvented management when it's only 11 years old? All those old, slow companies were young and innovative once.
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