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Google's Ten Golden Rules
selvan writes "Newsweek is running an article entitled Google's Ten Golden Rules. The article, by Eric Schmidt and Hal Varian, going into the philosophy behind the company." From the article: "Don't be evil. Much has been written about Google's slogan, but we really try to live by it, particularly in the ranks of management. As in every organization, people are passionate about their views. But nobody throws chairs at Google, unlike management practices used at some other well-known technology companies. We foster to create an atmosphere of tolerance and respect, not a company full of yes men."
From TFA
Wow...an article written by Google about how great Google is...the very definition of conflict-of-interest.
While I'm aware that Slashdot is contractually obligated to post any and all stories about Google that possess even the most infinitesimal amount of positive spin, this seems extreme even here.
Oh, and Newsweek, shame on you.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Anyway... the only golden rule I aknowledge is "He who has the gold, makes the rules"
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
I wonder which company they're talking about?
Throwing chairs...rings a bell.
Mi...cro...?
Nope lost it.
Coral Cache link: http://www.msnbc.msn.com.nyud.net:8090/id/10296177 /site/newsweek/
Scully: Should we arrest David Copperfield?
Mulder: Yes we should, but not for this.
Does any of this really matter now? The moment they went public, their defining philosophy turned into maximizing profits for their share holders in any way lawfully possible. The share holders now control board votes, not google's lofty ideals.
I believe somewhere around 1550 B.C., a gentleman by the name of Moses received 10 rules from the CEO of the universe. Unfortunately the were not followed to closely. Time has a way of washing away convictions and ideals. I applaud Google for their intent, but I would wager these lofty goals will settle to reality when the bottom dollar hits the road.
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
11) Having fricking huge piles of cash so you can actually afford to do 1-10.
From TFA: For example, one of the reasons for Gmail's success is that it was beta tested within the company for many months.
Not only do they, as they said in this article, eat they own dog food, but they make us do it.
Beta 1, Google Inc, Beta 2, The World!!
Scully: Should we arrest David Copperfield?
Mulder: Yes we should, but not for this.
...unless the Chinese communists need help.
I read
I wish more desgin folks would take a cue from google's main search page at www.google.com and get the net back to a more simplicity/focus on content approach to delivering information.
Interesting article - I believe the management really are smoking their own stuff, from what I've experienced from dealing with googles people.
I just hope they don't get too spread thin and have trouble with upkeeping excellence with their various product.
what is their slogan, anyway?
I don't get why Google has to yammer on and on about "don't be evil". That would say to me that they think most companies are evil, and google has to be different and say that all the time.
The fact is that the vast majority of businesses aren't evil, Microsoft included. They might do some bad things, but no reasonable person could say they are overall evil. Now Enron, and Worldcom could be considered evil, but there are the rare exceptions in American society, not the rule.
I like google, but sometimes they are a little full of themselves. They are bright and smart people, maybe too smart for their own good. For all people talk about Microsoft and Apple's arrogance, Google has got a pretty big head for a company not even 10 years old.
But nobody throws chairs at Google, unlike management practices used at some other well-known technology companies.
Thou shalt not be bitchy about competitors.
Also, I take issue with the "Pack them in" criterium. What I like most about my job right now is the space I get. Email, instant-message, radio, etc, make "packing them in" a reality for any company with these technologies. I'd like to be able to fart at my desk or turn on a stereo and not have anybody make a fuss about it.
I think they're trying to justify sticking their employees two-per-cubicle for lack of floor space.
What interested me was how they treat "knowledge workers".
Their principles can be summed up like this:
1. Pay them based on what they produce, not how many hours they're in the office.
2. Get out of their way whenever possible.
3. Keep them informed
4. Let teams make decisions, not some arrogant-but-stupid manager
I say that's the sort of thing that makes me want to work there.
One of our not-so-secret weapons is our ideas mailing list: a companywide suggestion box where people can post ideas ranging from parking procedures to the next killer app. The software allows for everyone to comment on and rate ideas, permitting the best ideas to percolate to the top.
So, Google uses a Slash like moderation system? Imagine being able to moderate a PHB (-1, Talking out of Your ASS), or a colleague (-1, Clueless Luser). And moderating the CEO (-100, Evil - Fuck Shareholder Value, This is Wrong!) to keep them to thier word.
That would be cool.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
If accusations are automatically true, then I accuse all Slashdot readers of being pathetic geeks with no life.
Hey, wait a minute...
My comments are my own, and do not represent the views of my employer, my spouse, my children, or my cats.
Someday I would like to find the person who came up with this concept and shoot them in the head. I find nothing enhances my productivity more than having to listen to other people's meaningless personal phone conversations or conference calls that have nothing to do with what I'm working on, the assorted smells and sounds the human body makes that are not pleasant, the incesant pinging and chiming of IMs and email alerts, not to mention having my personal business available to anyone who wishes to stare over my shoulder.
Oh to have an office! And if I needed a co-worker's help and/or advice and they won't return emails/phone calls, I would simply get my butt out of my chair, go to their cubicle, grab them by the lapels (or goatee if there are no lapels) and tell them we need to have a little chat. There's nothing like the personal approach! And then I could return to my office, close the door, crank the Rush, and get back to doing what I'm supposed to be doing, which is coding.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Riiight... I know collecting data always only ever works out in favour of the individual that has been monitored. Lovely stuff like advertising tailored to your needs etc.
How on earth does Google want to be not evil, when every single thing they do is designed to collect as much data about people as possible (and that includes "free WLAN for everybody" - monitor surfing habits at the root has to be Google's wet dream)? I think they would have to make a VERY directed effort to avoid being evil.
Lots of what they are doing is in line with the Agile Work Axioms and agile practices. For example:
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
This company is spooky in it's rate of innovation. Even, as the article points out, in it's management strategy as well.
Google, being the most popular search engine on the planet is privilege to the tiniest emerging trends, harvested by our searches. Our collective secrets. So they know quite a bit about what we want.
Rumors are that Google is considering Riya another spookily intelligent beta photo service that will probably put Flickr to shame while spark spin-off revolutions impossible to predict.
Oh, yeah, and aren't they supposed to come out with Google Calendar today?
Technology commoditizes everything and Google leverages IT extremely well.
Starting with the commoditization of information, Google's stated mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Perhaps next we will see the commoditization of the world's knowledge, followed by our collective intelligence.
I don't know if Google will be the entity to do that, but the trajectory seems clear to me with Google setting the pace.
I recently finished an article called: Technology, Computers and Innovation: Why Everything is Speeding Up exploring what's behind the accelerating rate of innovation in technology. Even though the rate of worldwide technological acceleration is astounding, it seems Google is still strides ahead. ~ted
Thoughts on the Emergence of Computing Intelligence
That's wrong, or at least, the premise is incorrect. A publicly traded corporation is only required to abide by what their SEC paperwork says. For most companies, that does mean maximizing profits. But that's not an absolute rule.
In Google's SEC filings, and in most of its public statements, it says they won't be evil. Any investor in the company is assumed to have read those filings and public comments. Caveat emptor.
An accountant will tell you that "profit" is a somewhat artificial result. A complex set of corporate books allows you to attribute money to expenses, investment in future growth, savings for future tax liability, or whatever. Some companies choose to pay dividends, others choose to buy back their own stock. They have a range of options, as long as they cover themselves in their SEC filings.
They do have to play by the rules, but maximizing profit isn't necessarily one of them, and it doesn't have to mean maximizing quarterly profit.
sigs, as if you care.
Oh ya see now Google has done it, 10 Golden Rules = 10 Commandments, I get it. Next thing you will hear is how Google is more popular than Jesus ... oh wait
Such a line of crap. "don't be evil" "tolerance"? "respect"? Kind of like the respect they have for the authors who have asked them not to scan their work, ya, they aren't evil at all. Ya its not evil just going ahead, ignoring the IP creators, just because "you know what's best for them" or to make some money. Yep, they aren't evil at all.
Seriously the media loves google and that is the only reason the stock is so inflated. If we didn't know better you'd think they weren't the one with site traffic behind aol, yahoo, and msn, by ten of millions of visitors. Its similar to apple, by all the good press and constant front page articles you'd think they'd have more then a few percentage points of the desktop market, but nope.
This at the end of the day is why all the predictions that Microsoft is going to fail "the next time around" never come true. Why that crowd is always dumbfounded that MS does so well time and time again. At some point you have to stop believing your won FUD and Fluff pieces and try to get the facts.
Google's stock is going to cr4ash like the dot.com bubble. The only question is whether or not YOU will get your money out before or after it tanks.
This is actually a fairly standard article format: they asked the head of a succesful company to write an article on what he thinks makes that company succesful. It's not meant to be an in-depth analysis, just a highlight of what they think is important/different about their company.
It gives some idea of how the management thinks of the company, and what they try to work on. Sure, it's a fluff piece, the equivilent of the society column for businesses, but it's a moderately useful fluff peice. And it can help some people, espcially if you want to understand how Google thinks about itself.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
11. Only hire Ivy League grads.
12. Make a reference to Stanford in the first five minutes of every conversation.
13. Require hefty formal academic credentials for positions that are mostly clerical, administrative, or customer service. Because we're cool, like NeXT was.
14. Use the "W" hotel for conferences; it impresses the kids.
15. Eric Schmidt can lead us. After all, Sun did so well. And Novell, under his leadership. Plus, he looks like "Jimmy James" from News Radio.
16. Search! Don't sort! DON'T SORT! Do it OUR WAY! We are SMARTER THAN YOU! In fact, you can't even sign up for this.
it's not like it was a trick, the article starts off, "At google, we think..."
-- lol pwned
Bread and Circus....keep them fed and entertained and you can make them do anything!! Hoo ha haaaaaaa!
Seven,WTF? Is editing evil?
Say hello to my little sig.
> Wow...an article written by Google about how great Google is...the very definition of conflict-of-interest.
:) Seriously, no offense meant but that's what every successful company does. "We're great and here is why..." Would you buy from a company that said "We are not great?" Didn't think so.
Your grasp on marketing is outstanding.
In this case all my annoyance is at Newsweek. the state of mainstream journalism in this country is pretty bad, and they don't need to be turing over their pages to corperate PR folks. How about taking the CEOs talking points and then going into the workplace and see them actually being implemented? Ask the average employee about the quality of the food in the cafeteria. Do a little work.
This isn't wuite as bad as the news orginizations who did nothing but repeat the Bush administration's lies in the lead up to war, but its the exact same concept.
sorry 'bout the mess...
And even the Google Toolbar.. personally, it was the first "good" toolbars that actually worked, and blocked popups.. granted, ya don't even need it nowadays, but still, it was a major help 2 years ago.. if you're critical about Google, you obviously must know something that we don't.. you probably read too much in to Google vs MS politics.. screw it man.. the most important thing is, that their products kick ass.. if Google runs their entire world one day, I'll gladly let them.. because I know they'll do a great job.. and the best job..
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
Really? This is not being presented as news; it is clearly by Google about Google. I see no reason why Newsweek should be ashamed.
If this had been in Harvard Business Review, no one would have batted an eye.
Google more popular than jesus.
i swear, the more i hear about google, the more they sound like the borg from star trek: "resistance is futile" and all that
of course i'll be modded into obvlivion for saying this, it goes agains the mindless slashot cliques: "google good, microsoft baaad" say the slashdot sheeple
read the comment again. it's a stupid manifesto of corporate life. the point is, IT'S STILL SOUL SUCKING CORPORATE LIFE
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Google's top rule "Don't Be Evil" only applies if its not in their best interest to be evil.
Look at the whole searching printed material fiasco they have gotten themselves into. They just went ahead and started making pages of printed material available online, without regard for the authors and publishers of those works. If Google truely WASN'T EVIL, then they would have sat down with the publishing industry, conveyed what they were trying to do, and work with the industry to create a solution that all would be happy with.
Communicate effectively? Only if you make them millions. My website was suddenly blocked from using Google's Ads. I was simply experimenting with them, figuring out how to get them into my webpage before it went live. Google claims that I was creating invalid click counts and barred my website from their program. When I tried to contact them to ask them to verify their decision and to explain how they felt I was violating their policy, they simply responded by sending me a link to their policy. When I felt I did not violate their policy, I was basically ignored from that point forward.\
Hire by committee. I know exactly how this works. First step, write a test to see if you know your stuff. While this may sound like a great concept in hiring practices, in truth their are many brilliant programmers out their that may not know exactly how to write a template C++ class or other trivial menial programming concepts. But, in reality, they have created astounding and well conceived application solutions from an almost intrinsic and intuitive knowledge of programming. Score badly on that test and you won't be talking to anyone else at Google, period. On the flip side, hiring people that score well on those tests mean they studied just before the test, or have enough book smarts to remember countless meaningless trivial tidbits, and then wonder why they can't program themselves out of a box or have one ounce of creativity.
Strive to reach consensus. The "many are smarter then the individual" myth. I don't know, its been my experience that the collective IQ of all society is 0. The larger the group of people involved in making the decision, the dumber the outcome. Look at US politics. George Bush elected a second time? Look at Candian Politics. Jean Cretien Liberal's lasted 13 years? This is because humans can't communicate effectively in a group and any important decision making gets lots in endless meetings, debates and discussions which starts to cloud the obvious decision. If this is how Google is doing business, then it explains why projects like GMail have been in a perpetual beta for over 2 years and they are falling behind other more innovative web mail solutions.
I don't like Google, period. They are quickly becoming a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none company creating knee jerk reactionary services and spreading themselves out too thin. The bubble will burst once Google can no longer higher enough staff to work in each of the many many projects they have on the go. Eventually, as I said with Gmail falling behind Yahoo and other more innovative web email server solutions, Google will start to see the quality of those services suffer as users strive to find other more focused solutions by companies not interested in dominating the entire web experience.
Google is out to ensure that you have to pass through them to get anything done on the web. Anybody not realizing how monopolistic and dominating their goals are probably thinks Microsoft is a nice benevolent company creating good products. The only people that believe this tripe are Wall Street investors throwing billions at a company that really isn't doing anything other then organizing data other people have created.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Back in the day, Ken Lay, CEO of Enron, used to tout Enron's internal policy of always taking the moral high ground and that all its employees exhibited the highest ethical standards, even going so far as to say that Enron set the bar when it came to business ethics. Shocking to think that we cannot always trust what the heads of corporations tell us.
In Vino Veritas
But everyone loses sight of the fact that the end goal of all these enticements is simply to get you to stay at work. That's it.
But on the other hand, the way they get you to stay at work is by making you genuinely want to stay at work because it's enjoyable. I really don't think that's evil--if it works, you are happy; if it doesn't then you don't have incentive to stay later than your work requires, and you go home.
I work at one of the companies in your list, and I know people in both camps, and I haven't seen any negative repercussions for the people who don't spend their leisure time at work. They still get their work done, and management recognizes and respects that. Mileage may vary from group to group or company to company of course, but that's certainly the way it is all around me.
No shit.
/always/ bad.
It's not presented as an impartial article. In fact, if you actually *read* the article, it is made very clear that the article comes from inside Google.
Writing about yourself isn't
I believe Ringo would be MSN
Congratulations on missing the point. This isn't an article on how great Google is. This is an article by somebody in Google management trying to explain how Google handles its employees, and why it has been sucessful. For somebody managing a small company, emulating some of these things might be interesting. I know gang interviews will be a new concept to at least a few people. We used them where I used to work, and they're a blast. It's easy for a canidate to convince management that he knows the engineering, its less easy for him to convince his potential coworkers.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I particularly like "Hire by Committee". This tends to weed out those individuals with work disrupting character flaws.
I don't like "Pack 'em in". Individual offices are much better. Phone tag and emails are not that big a problem. The practice of setting up "war rooms" or "pack 'em in" is done to indimidate workers. The way to get out of one of these bullpens is to eat Mexican food, chili or perhaps Indian food and cut rank farts until they beg you to move.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
As I write this, the above is rated (Score:2, Funny). Because of this rating, the post is amusing, but would not be otherwise.
I 3 self-fulfilling prophecies!
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
Mary Kay Cosmetics: "To give unlimited opportunity to women."
Merck: "To preserve and improve human life."
Wal-Mart: "To give ordinary folk the chance to buy the same thing as rich people."
Walt Disney: "To make people happy."
McDonald's: "McDonald's vision is to be the world's best quick service restaurant experience. Being the best means providing outstanding quality, service, cleanliness, and value, so that we make every customer in every restaurant smile."
So, is Google evil?
Spiderman said it best; "With great power. .
-FL