2. Mission statement
• Google's mission is to organize the world's
information and make it universally accessible
and useful.
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3. Stats for Google
• Over 1 billion users per week. Over 100 billion
searches per month. Over 1 billion Android
activations. Over 1 billion YouTube users per
month. That’s the stats of Google.
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4. Innovation Engine
• Google has a unique culture, organizational
design, incentive system, and an infrastructure
that is tailored for innovation.
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5. How Google Does it
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Practice strategic patience
Exploit an infrastructure “built to build”
Rule your own ecosystem
Exercise architectural control
Build Innovation into Organizational Design
Innovate Incrementally and Constantly
Support Inspiration with Data and Analytics
Make Your Knowledge Workers Productive
[Reverse Engineering Google’s Innovation Machine, Bala Iyer and Tom Davenport
(HBR, April 2008)]
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6. Unique Infrastructure
• Scalability
– Over a million servers
– Unique access to power
– Proprietary operating system and database
• High performance
– Better than 92% of all websites despite being #1 in
traffic
• An accelerated product development life cycle
• Support for third-party development and
mashups
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7. Architectural Control
• Can track activity through links
– Each API call has a unique key
– Calls can be tracked by user/application/domain
– Differential pricing by user or call rates
• API-based relationships can be dynamic
• Ownership of data and applications allows for different
business models
• Unique value chains can be crafted for market segments
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8. Organizational Design
• Budget innovation into job descriptions
– 70/20/10 for technical people, plus Director of
“Other”
• Eliminate friction at every turn
• Let the market choose
• Cultivate a taste for failure and chaos
– “Please fail very quickly – so that you can try again”—
Eric Schmidt
– “We kind of like the chaos. Creativity comes out of
people bumping into each other and not knowing
where to go.”—Laszlo Bock, head of Personnel
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9. Role of a Manager
• Company built by engineers for engineers
• 35,000 employees, 5000 managers, 1000
directors and 50 VPs
• Span of control is over 30 per manager
• Focus on work not micromanaging
• Meritocracy and focus on ideas
• Creating the best environment for engineers
to make things happen
How Google Sold Its Engineers on Management, by David Garvin
HBR December 2013
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10. Constant Innovation
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Roughly 40 products—CEO doesn’t know them all
New feature or function incorporated almost every day
Many products in semi-permanent “beta”
Build and buy
Everybody encouraged to innovate
– “In my first month at Google, I complained to a friend on the
Gmail team about a couple of small things that I disliked about
Gmail. I expected him to point me to the bug database. But he
told me to fix it myself, pointing me to a document on how to
bring up the Gmail development environment on my
workstation. The next day my code was reviewed by Gmail
engineers, and then I submitted it. A week later, my change was
live.”—Google software engineer in blog
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11. Analytics Driven
• Page rank analytics are the core of Google
• Google has some of the world’s best statisticians and
algorithms for serving ads
• Google makes Google Analytics available for free to users
• Anyone proposing a new offering is first asked, “Have you
tested it with data?”
• Extensive use of analytics on people
– Googlyness index for hiring
– Prediction of attrition
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12. All about Knowledge Workers
• Ten Golden Rules—Schmidt and Varian
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Hire by committee
Cater to their every need
Pack them in
Make coordination easy
Eat your own dog food…
• Mario Batali, Tom Friedman, and Robin Williams drop by in
one day
• Widespread use of prediction markets
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22. The Google Way
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70/20/10 principle
Analytics driven
Experimentation (Google Ventures)
Transparency
Ubiquity first, revenues later (URL)
Recruiting
Owning foundational elements
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23. Some (Early) Google CSF’s
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Coverage / comprehensiveness
Relevance of results
Speed/latency: infrastructure
Usefulness
Usability
• For both users and advertisers
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25. Demo of the future
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Vint Cerf - 2020 Shaping Ideas
Mobile Apps
Android Scan
Sergey Brin: Why Google Glass?
Google driverless car
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26. What should Google do next?
• Take a look at the products listed on their
website
• Pick a product that they should commercialize
to companies
• What is the reason for picking this product?
• In particular, think about how this helps move
a consumer along the customer life cycle.
• How would you track the effectiveness of this
product?
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27. Google takeaways
• Search is vital to E-commerce
• Google has built a giant search utility
• Learning to use Google could help with competitive
differentiation
• How to use Google for your business
– Use Google productivity products
– Adwords for searches on Google’s site: bid on
keywords
– Adsense on your site: relate to key content
– Complementary services: Google Checkout,
Google Base, Google Analytics
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28. What is a platform?
• A product or service should perform at least one
essential function within what can be described
as a “system of use” or solve an essential
technological problem within an industry, and
• It should be easy to connect to or build upon to
expand the system of use as well as to allow new
and even unintended end-user
• [Platform Leaders by Gawer and Cusumano, MIT
Sloan Management Review, Winter 2008]
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