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1.
Ideas come from everywhere.
"We have this great internal list where
people post new ideas and everyone can go on and see them. It's like
a voting pool where you can say
how good or bad you think an idea is. Those comments lead to new
ideas." |
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2.
Share whatever you can.
Every idea, every
project, every deadline – it's all accessible to everyone on the
intranet
"People are blown away by the
information you can get on MOMA, our intranet. Because there is so
much information shared across the company,
employees
have insight
into what's happening with the business and what's important. We
also have people do things like Snippets. Every Monday, all the
employees write an email that has five to seven bullet points on
what you did the previous week. Being a search company, we take all
the emails and make a giant Web page and index them. If you're
wondering, 'Who's working on maps?' you can find out. It allows us
to share what we know across the whole company, and it reduces
duplication."
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3.
You're brilliant, we're hiring.
Hire not just the best but the most brilliant.
"When I was a grad student at Stanford,
I saw that phrase on a flyer for another company in the basement of
the computer-science building. It made me stop dead in my tracks and
laugh out loud. A couple of months later, I'm working at
Google, and
the engineers were asked to write job ads for engineers. We had a
contest. I put, 'You're
brilliant? We're hiring. Come work at
Google,' and got eight times the click rate that anyone else got.
Google now has a thousand times as many
people as when I started, which is just staggering to me. What's
remarkable, though, is what hasn't changed--the types of people who
work here and the types of things that they like to work on. It's
almost identical to the first 20 or so of us at Google. There is
this amazing element to the
culture
of wanting to
work on big problems
that matter, wanting to do great things for the world, believing
that we can build a successful business without compromising our
standards and
values.
If I'm an
entrepreneur and I want to
start a Web site, I need a billing system. Oh, there's Google
Checkout. I need a mapping function. Oh, there's Google Maps. Okay,
I need to monetize. There's
Google AdSense, right? I need a user
name and password-authentication system. There's Google Accounts.
This is just way easier than going out and trying to create all of
that from scratch. That's how we're going to
stay innovative.
We're going to continue to attract
entrepreneurs who
say, 'I found an idea, and I can go to Google and have a demo in a
month and be launched in six.'"
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4.
A license to pursue
dreams.
Employees get a "free" day a week. Half of new launches come
from this 20% time.
"Since around 2000, we let engineers
spend 20% of their time working on whatever they want, and we trust
that they'll build interesting things. After September 11, one of
our researchers, Krishna Bharat, would go to 10 or 15 news sites
each day looking for information about the case. And he thought, Why
don't I write a program to do this? So Krishna, who's an expert in
artificial intelligence, used a Web crawler to cluster articles. He
later emailed it around the company. My office mate and I got it,
and we were like, 'This isn't just a cool little tool for Krishna.
We could add more sources and build this into a great product.'
That's how Google News came about. Krishna did not intend to
build a
product, but he
accidentally gave us the idea for one."
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5.
Innovation, not instant
perfection.
Google launches early and often in small
beta tests before
releasing new features widely...
More
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