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Google's Idea of Productivity Is a Bad Fit For Many Other Workplaces
New submitter rjupstate writes "Google places a lot of value on the spontaneous creativity that can occur when two employees from completely different parts of the company meet. It's an ideal that Google has perfected over the years, but it's not something that will work for most other organizations. Executives trying to replicate Google's approach could even create major problems among their workforces."
Anyone?
While google do this and I'm sure are very good at it, it's not Google's invention and it's certainly not new.
This is/was one of the major roles that the US National Labs play. Compared to univesities there is a lot more mixing between divisions and as a result a lot of very interesting science gets done because new and unexpected things pop up.
Of course now that they're run by nice efficient profit making private companies rather than hippie commie inefficient public universities, that's pretty much been killed and all semblance of productivity has gone. But that's a rant for another day.
If companies think that this kind of innication nd productivity is a bad fit then it's because they're assuming implicitly that they won't be around for more than a year. If they're going to be around you need to develop new products and also develop better ways of creating/designing/building those products. If you're not doing that, then you risk losing out to someone who does.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
When a company is successful - especially a sexy tech company - other companies always seem to try to copy their working practices to try and emulate that success. 20 years ago it was Microsoft. Before that it was IBM. These days it's Google.
Well, I can reveal the one thing you need to be as successful as Google: Have an effective monopoly on internet searches. Or Operating systems. Or computers.
The thing is, Google can be as inefficient as it likes. It has a hefty cash cow bringing in the money. Perhaps Google's idea here works, perhaps it doesn't. The fact that Google does it doesn't make it magic. You need a product to make a lot of money.
I used to find out more interesting stuff in a couple of minutes in the smoking shelter than in any organised meeting. I work in IT infrastructure btw.
Any examples of new _profitable_ and _innovative_ (copying others doesn't count for much) Google stuff that has come out of Google's idea of productivity?
So far they're still mostly making money from ads right? What else?
I doubt most companies will be so happy that their employees come out with innovative stuff that doesn't actually make the company more money.
Of-course they create problems.
First: Google business was growing with the developers that worked there, so they knew and understood the business model and processes. It's unlikely that in most other companies business is fully understood by the developers.
Second: Google hiring practice ensures they have above average employees, I know that many companies say this sort of thing, but it's just not true for most companies. Their hiring practice and pay levels are nowhere near sufficient to attract and retain top level talent.
Third: Google can survive many failed projects and still get publicity out of some of them, they are an advertising agency, but they are a tech company. Most other companies have tech bolten on top somehow, but their core is some other business, not tech itself. The more tech things Google does, the more it has to invest in tech infrastructure and this always heps their business model, so even many failed projects force thinking about further growth of tech infrastructure and from Google perspective that's what grows their business anyway.
You can't handle the truth.
Well yes of course. If there's one thing I have learned from reading the Harvard Business Review is that to build a successful company your management structure needs to be flexible yet strict, specific and diverse, your company needs to have a flat organisational chart with few managers, it needs many levels of management to keep it under control. You need to keep your employees happy by letting them think for themselves, and you need to control their every movement and thought throughout the day. You need to diversify and yet focus on your core competencies.
The reality is that the only universally unsuccessful business strategy is thinking that simply copying some successful company will guarantee you success. In any other case I'm sure I can find an example in the Harvard Business Review where {insert management fad of the week} will be the best thing your company can't do without.
So basically what they are saying is, you should always stick to people like yourself and never try to expand your views to any sort of 'foreign' cultures or viewpoints? Because the stereotypical Caucasion American is the peak of human development.
I work in a small R & D team set up as an internal joint venture between two daughter companies of the same group. Some time ago, the other daughter - i.e. the one I do not belong to - withdrew its commitment. We decided to carry on, on our own. What happens now is that our people go informally to engineers and stakeholders of the "other" daughter, and that work is being done as before - albeit without the formal blessing of management, almost in a subversive way. Do I like it better this way ? Sure, it feels like working, suddenly and again, in a combination of an open-source project and a start-up. Is it frustrating ? Yes, whenever I try to get some resources for a task longer than a few days. Overall, though, it's better.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Google rejected Con Kolivas because of his "Lack of breadth" . Once a company gets bigger and successful ( financially ) rigidity and bureaucracy creeps in invariably . It's like the cycle of dominant species on this planet ..
..
-- Don't take that long haired barefoot hacker called Stallman lightly
The problem is that too many workplaces simply want to copy what's being done elsewhere, without actually considering what's appropriate given their own unique criteria (eg staff, line of business, available workspace, relationships between employees and between employees and upper management etc).
I've seen many ridiculous policies introduced by various businesses because "$othercompany does it" when it's a very poor fit...
Chief among these is the idea that simply working longer hours will increase productivity... This may work in extremely mundane roles, but in roles which are taxing either physically or mentally the employees will get tired and subsequently work more slowly, make more mistakes, or usually both.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HrIAGxRHPI
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Just because something works in one context, does not mean it is also a great idea in another area.
Cite, please?
Everything they list from Google is ENCOURAGING employees to spend time around the workplace. That produces a very different attitude then FORCING employees to do this. People don't like to be forced, and quite frankly, as soon as you start forcing, your employees will start only living up to your most basic demands. Rather then happy, productive, creative employees, you will have people doing the bare minimum asked of them. That's the whole reason Google uses BRIBES in the first place, to keep their employees happy and producitve.
Most companies don't understand this, and THAT is why it can't be replicated by most companies.
Simple example, employee arrives at work, sees a newspaper sitting on the ground in front of the office, and decides to pick it upon the way in. Manager sees this, and tells the employee he will now have to do that every day, or get fired. Instead of doing this out of good will, the employee is now doing this to not get fired, (note: not every employee has a choice about where they work).
A week later, on the way in, the employee sees one of their signs has been knocked down. He thinks about fixing it for a second, but remembers what happened last time. The last thing he wants is to be seen anywhere near that sign, and so simply walks away.
I'm using this as an example BECAUSE COMPANIES ACTUALLY DO THIS, LITERALLY. The article talks about them trying to force good will among employees, and it not working, and we're what, surprised?
and they say the only problem with this is that some employees who made an agreement with the company to NOT HAVE TO RELOCATE, will have to; being forced to move to a different city, despite the contract saying otherwise sounds like a massive breach of contract.
Because what?, one guy got caught doing what companies have been doing for years?, or was it that companies have been trying to do for years, but always get extremely shitty code out of it? Or was it because he was technically not a manager, and should therefore know his place? For the price they were paying him, he always met his targets and by their own admission produced good code. Companies can't have that, now can they?
Those who never have been with Google do not really know the ground truth about life at Google. Those who are with Google at the moment of this writing are not going to speak up here (at least to say anything contrary to rosy pictures) if they want to keep working for Google. Those who left had signed NDA and still may hold Google shares, etc.
management by cargo cult? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult#Metaphorical_uses_of_the_term
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
This reminds of the Scrum fad at many local development shops. Unfortunately, the only part of the Scrum actually implemented is the daily meeting. From where I sit, the problem is that Google, Scrum, etc. are predicated on the idea that an independent group of individuals will produce good results. This works when the group is made up of high-performing individuals who naturally fulfill different roles needed to accomplish the task at hand. In my experience, these individuals are the exception, and only elite organizations are able to recruit and retain them, and only for elite tasks. As much as I hate to admit it, the rest of us need some managing to get the more mundane (and abundant) projects done. Only only wish there were more more skilled managers.
It's a culture that rewards "cool ideas" instead of rock solid code (OK, the search engine infrastructure has the latter, but that's the one hit they developed themselves). Pitch or perish.
So Google releases lots of trial balloons that are mistaken for real products (y'know, like they'll be around in a few years) by consumers.
Google is effectively a conglomerate, with its employees encouraged to expand that conglomerate into as many interesting and profitable business lines as is possible. Generally they try to stick to their strength of crazy big data but that encompasses a huge area of business. So nearly out of control innovation and expansion makes sense. Also google has the raw spare revenue to regularly screw up so they can play the odds that a certain small fraction of their experiments will pay off.
Most other businesses are constrained by a more focused core business (we make drill bits, or we sell wooden patio furniture) so right off the bat random explorations into whatever catches an employe's attention would just be weird. But more importantly most businesses are not experiencing a waterfall of money that they can risk on basically everything. Even if a company does have an R&D budget it is sufficiently tight that careful thought needs to be given before spending it.
That all said, most older companies seem to have huge institutional resistance to change, huge as in they are allergic to it. A common scenario that I have seen is where a new employee comes in and is bathed in stupid procedures or technologies that are potentially from the 70s. They will suggest a simple effective change and be told something like "Whoa there young'n, don't think you can come in here fresh out of diapers and start running the place. You need to earn some seniority and then it will be your turn (20-30 years from now)." This comes under the category of "Don't make me look bad."
Simple tech examples of this would be companies that I have seen where IT companies were using ISDN (256K) for 50+ employees when a home connection would be in the Mbs. Companies still buying Sun hardware when their own software provider had told them years before that all support for Sun was over and that their licence was portable to Linux where the upgrades were plentiful.
And my favorite where a large company was using a terminal based product management system that took employees weeks and weeks to master (RT for return to main menu, DTS 12147 for display sales of the 147th day of 2012). So one of the employees, on his own, time developed a web based system that interfaced with the termina system's API. A drunken monkey could use the new web based system, the company nearly fired him for "hacking" their system. So he sent off screenshots to the company who made the terminal based system and they bought(and hired) it from him and less than a year later the old company bought an amazing web based upgrade. Keep in mind this upgrade cost them a bloody fortune. One other fact was that it was well within the design of the system to interface other systems with it. For instance the POS system was separate and had been built to interface with the back end terminal system so developing a web interface to a published API was not even some kind of violation of the license. So in this example you have a company doing google style innovation for free and still rejecting it.
My last observation is that risk taking also requires the company know how to deal with failure. Many companies will set people on fire when there are failures. In these environments managers will keep a very very tight reign on their employees so that they stick to the plan. This significantly reduces risk but generally makes the employees unhappy and basically eliminates innovation. But from the manager's point of view everything will run smoothly and bonuses will be forthcoming. This would come under the general heading of "Don't rock the boat."
I used to work at General Atomics's original campus in La Jolla, which was created in the 60s.
The campus was mainly a series of concentric circles. The main circular building had a curvature which was "calculated" to maximize random interactions with scientists and engineers outside your normal working group while also giving an illusion of working in a small group. There were pools, gyms, baseball fields and support buildings around the outside and along the radial lines. The center of the circle was a large cafeteria.
This was all great as long as nuclear power was going to save the world and money was rolling in. When the company hit hard times the ball fields were turned into office rentals and many non essential services were stopped.
When the company once again was making money with military hardware, the new buildings were simpler and located in a less expensive area of San Diego.
Really? How does isolating workers so they only ever interact with other members of their teams help an organization?
And how is meeting people who are working on different projects and may already have thought of some of the ideas that haven't dawned on you yet harmful?
The best idea's are one that just come to you, I can't even count the number of times I've figured out the missing part to a piece of code well eating dinner or having a beer. People that claim it's better to sit down and put all your mental energy into one task are just fooling themselves, they don't want to admit that it's better to just relax and let the ideas come to you. If you have to over think a solution it's not worth it. Google has created a system where employees are free to think openly and freely and at the same time who aren't forced into cubical's / offices and made to work pointlessly. Most if not all the projects I work on, I work on this way, I still get everything done in the same deadlines and I produce the same if not better work overall.
In every single company I've worked for, across many industries, physical presence and chats by the coffee machine led to the best collaborations. This worked in localization, software engineering, strategy consulting, and telecoms. This also worked in small business, large multinationals, Asia, US, and European companies...
The article is just another story bashing Yahoo for getting rid of teleworking probably written by someone who works from home banging out articles, and not collaborating. I'm all for innovation... and completely against teleworking because in my experience spanning more than a decade of collaborative innovation across all kinds of workplaces and industries shows that spontaneous creativity is never something that happens without multiple people giving input which is fostered best by casual / chance encounters.
This just doesn't happen when you sit in your jammies at home.
Teleworking is only really useful for production jobs that don't require physical presence and which are compensated through results achieved as opposed to hours worked.
The data presented as evidence in TFA are about productivity and telecommuting. The data presented against the author's point aren't, they're about creativity and innovation. He's comparing apples and SUVs.
I have yet to see a study that says that telecommuting improves innovation in a company.
I think the author is missing the point here, that Google is more concerned about innovation than straight productivity. They know that if they don't innovate, they will go the way of Yahoo!.
Other than Google's core advertising business, Google are not that great. Docs, drive, whatever they call it is very poor quality.
Alta Vista would actually let you search for exact strings or phrases and exclude everything else. Google still doesn't.
...but I've followed them closely.
A long time ago I noted that the biggest challenge of the Internet was going to be finding things. As an undergrad I earned a bit of extra money working in the university library, and was told, on my very first day, that if you don't put something in the right place you might as well throw it away, because it's unlikely anybody will be able to find it otherwise. Now we have Google. Dave Cheriton was one of my undergrad profs, BTW, a 2nd year course in data structures that used Pascal.
Another lesson from my undergrad days is that the structure of a product is isomorphic to the structure of the group that created it. I currently support legacy software that was created by people who never talked to each other, who never even sat down for a chat over lunch. It shows. The interface specs read like legal contracts. The product line worked for a while, but is now unmaintainable, unsupportable, well in to its end of life bug explosion, and we are actively developing replacements.
The company imploded in 2001. What was left tried a looser development process. It sort of worked, but eventually failed. The biggest issue was a couple of extremely forceful people who steamrollered their own pet ideas and who refused to listen to others. The bosses needed to rein them in, and didn't. It cost us the company.
Our current development model is basically a surgical team in a skunkworks sort of environment. Head office is in Dallas. I'm in Vancouver. The physical separation is helpful. There aren't enough of us in the company to do much else. It works. We're doing good work. The company is making money. The bosses are happy. We're happy.
I like a lot of what Google is doing. I like the encouragement to be creative. Good people are creative, and if they're going to be creative, you might as well get them to be creative for you. And you have to take some risks. Not all decisions are right. Not all products are winners. But if you don't risk failure, you don't risk success either.
I have issues with the work/life balance implicit in the Googleplex work environment. Maybe I'm too old or something (I'm 51), but I expect to have a life apart from my work.
...laura
I don't know what they do today, but at Ford in the 90's co-locating engineers from different disciplines in one close physical area was considered critical to reducing the time to develop new car models.
Body, chassis, engine, transmission, HVAC, interior, wheel and tire, brake, manufacturing, glass, and plenty more, etc.. There are a vast number of different types of engineers and designers who must collaborate.
And when that car goes to production, those engineers are at the plant making sure it all goes right, all within the tight timelines and regulatory oversight that is part of the process.
Interacting via email, or in formal meetings, just isn't the same.
Combine your advertising teams with EVERYONE ELSE EVER.
God these people are dense and cannot figure out even the simplest of things.
What's that? Cannot monetize iGoogle? HUGE sidebar with nothing in it?! Bull. shit.
Likewise, Google Reader, easily monetized. (and those little strip-ads that are in Gmail could work too. Not those strip e-mails in your spam, though)
Oh well, both cancelled and with no decent replacement.
Oh, not to mention the fact that nobody knows the damn things exist.
For an advertising company, Google sure suck at advertising their own damn products.
A menu bar with "more" on it isn't acceptable way to advertise things.
And extensions with sync are nowhere near acceptable replacements if you intend on moving around a lot across many devices. (especially if you do not own said device you might use)
"Executives trying to replicate Google's approach could even create major problems among their workforces."
Primarily because most executives are utterly incompetent and succeed only through the blood, sweat and tears of their subordinates.
The UK drives on the left side of the road but divers attempting that in the states may find that it's not something that will work for most drivers.
Whenever a player quits EVE to go play WoW, the Average IQ of both games increase.
brilliant! Jen's ever-lengthening journey to the smoking era and her fellow dissidents (refugees) all rendered in a grey, cold Soviet Gulag fashion
-I'm just sayin'
Author is obsessed with the random encounters idea but effective teamworking is hardly mentioned at all. In my view Agile is what's killing telework.
What kind of office encourages proofreading? This article author Ryan Faas needs to work in that environment.
NOBODY is smart enough to invent and innovate much by themselves. Innovation requires multiple people interacting. Often interacting with periods of "flow". Interaction requires communication. All communication involves errors and correction. The quality and speed of errors and correction is directly related to the channel bandwidth. The internet is, and will likely always be, an inferior channel to direct face-to-face communication. Thus the internet will always be a slower and lower accuracy channel for communication and thus the interactions required for innovation will be slower and less accurate and less well corrected.
Innovation also requires physical proximity to the problem space. Most innovation involves both the product and the method of manufacture. This is true for both physical products and for software products. With physical products, the manufacturing process is inseparable from the product - the product is defined by the abilty to perform a particular, often innovative, form of manufacturing. Thus production innovation is also manufacturing innovation. Similarly for software, the methods and structures of the software are key to the software product itself.
Outsourcing (separating the idea from the physical realization) breaks this inseparable structure and companies and nations that follow this generally cease to innovate the technology. In software this is akin to working on the architecture or a component of code without ever testing and debugging it in the whole software product. You can do some of this but you end up lacking the human component to such a process.
But hell, what do I know. I've only been working in HW and SW for 35 years, founded several Silicon Valley companies and been pretty successful at it.
What drove Google, what drives companies like Eaton, Harley Davidson. IBM & others....IMAGINATION. You hire people who have imagination, not just basics. That's what the 20% represents & that's you're Research Dept. Now, if you encourage 'em, reward 'em, make 'em part owners then you are successful. If you're stock holders don't see, encourage & understand this, then either make sure they hold non-voting shares, or buy back from 'em as soon as possible. Having read some of the other comments here, FROM A MAJORITY OF Y'ALL WHO DON'T UNDERSTAND THIS...Then those of you 'agin' the idea are mere Robots!!'