See you all again on the last workday of the week, let’s talk a little bit related to Google, a lofty mission is Google’s most important culture and management style. In this column we will discuss something that must be said when talking about Google, it’s Google’s culture and management style.
In fact, there is already a lot of content on this topic on the Internet. Maybe most people have heard how good Google’s cafeteria is, how much it values engineers, or how many innovative products and innovations “20% free time” has brought to the company—profit and so on.
However, I still want to talk about the aspects that I learned the most and felt the deepest when I was observing and studying Google. The very first thing which is very impressed me is the importance to have a lofty mission as in Google.
We have also mentioned the importance of “mission” many times in any big organization. For example, when Alibaba was established in the early days, “making the world easy to do business” was its very clear mission said by Jack Ma.
Likewise, Facebook CEO Zuckerberg likes to tell such a story that, when the United States was trying to land on the moon, President John F Kennedy visited the NASA space center. He saw a doorman with a broom in his hand and went over to ask him what he was doing. The doorman replied, “Mr. President, I’m helping put a man on the moon.”
You will find that in any great organization, the way to bring people together is to rely on a great mission. For Facebook, this mission is to “connect the whole world”; for Google, this mission is to “build a lifelong university together” and become “organizing the world’s information and making it available to all” since its establishment in 1998.
In an organization, I think one of the most important functions of a great mission is to inspire everyone who is inspired by this mission to contribute to it. Even many times this behavior is very selfless.
In the book “How Google Works”, the author and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt told such a story. One afternoon in May 2002, Larry Page, one of the founders of Google, was hanging out on the Internet. At that time, he wanted to search for a Japanese motorcycle called “Kawasaki H1B”, but the returned search results were all kinds of advertisements of American law firms-because the code name of the American work visa is H-1B. Then Larry tried some more keywords, and the results were not satisfactory. This made him feel very problematic.
However, he did not directly hold people accountable, hold meetings, negotiate solutions, implements solutions, and so on. Larry just printed out the search results he didn’t like, marked them, and posted them on a bulletin board next to the pool table in the company lounge with the words “These ads suck.”
As a result, on Monday of the next week, Larry received an email at 5 a.m., sent by five engineers. They saw what Larry had posted on the bulletin board and spent a weekend working on a new solution. Links to various theoretical explanations and tests were also given. Later, this system became Google’s most famous AdWords advertising solution, bringing Google tens of billions of dollars in revenue.
Of course, the most important thing is that this advertising business is not within the scope of these five engineers. They just felt it was their responsibility to fix the problem, and they did. the
Of course, the reasons behind such a case are varied. The engineers hired by Google may be really capable and motivated; the company atmosphere created by Google may be really relaxed, so everyone likes to help each other, and so on. But there is no doubt that only by setting a lofty goal and mission can it be more likely to gather excellent people to solve problems together and make people unconsciously want to make their own contributions to the realization of this mission.
Therefore, Google later established three principles when evaluating projects internally as follows.
- First, does this project address a huge problem, or specifically, a problem that can affect a billion people;
- Second, is the solution of this project “radical” enough – “radical” here should be a neutral and positive word, more like “a powerful and unconstrained style”;
- Third, does this project use breakthrough technology?
Only when these three points are met, is the problem that will Google invest resources to solve. And questions like this will attract the best people to work with you.
Now, it comes to the end of our discussion topic related to the management style of Google, how is your thought and reflection on this topic? Do my article or column share to you interesting and helpful to you? Please give me feedback or exchange idea about what it does mean to me or improve for everyone. Thank you for your time reading my article. See you next.