How Google's Novel Management System Aids Growth

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Thursday April 27, 2006 @09:05AM from the sprouting-like-weeds dept.

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Gary Hamel, visiting professor at London Business School, argues in a Wall Street Journal commentary that Google's 'novel management system seems to have been designed to guard against the risk factors that so often erode an organization's evolutionary potential.' Among Google's advantages: The 20% rule, an 'expansive sense of purpose' and the credo, 'keep the bozos out and reward people who make a difference.' Hamel also traces the company's evolution from Google 1.0, 'a search engine that crawled the Web but generated little revenue,' to Google 5.0, 'an innovation factory that produces a torrent of new Web-based services, including Gmail, Google Desktop, and Google Base. More than likely, 6.0 is around the corner.'"

1 of 156 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Re:The Friendly Giant... by DragonWriter · 2006-04-27 09:31 · Score: 5, Informative

Google is currently somewhat insulated because its Class A stock (the publicly traded one) has 1 vote per share, and its Class B stock (held only by a narrow group of insiders) has 10 votes per share, which give those insiders something like 2/3 of the voting power.