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Business News/ News / Business Of Life/  Excerpt: How Google Works
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Excerpt: How Google Works

In their new book, Googlers Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg open up on the company's policies on transparency, hiringand the spat with China

A still from ‘The Internship’, a 2013 film about life at Googleplex, California. Premium
A still from ‘The Internship’, a 2013 film about life at Googleplex, California.

OTHERS :

Google has its fingers in almost every pie. Its search engine is the default choice for billions of PC and smartphone users, its mobile operating system (OS) is the market leader—Android had an 84.7% global market share, with Apple’s iOS a distant second at 11.7%, in the second quarter of 2014, according to International Data Corp.

According to Google, which last released user- base figures in 2012, Gmail had 425 million active users, almost double the next biggest service. YouTube traffic has gone through the roof. And this is just scratching the surface.

Curious to know what happens inside Googleplex—the US-based company’s Mountain View, California, headquarters—and what makes Google and Googlers (Google employees) tick? How Google Works, by Eric Schmidt, the company’s executive chairman and former chief executive officer (CEO), and Jonathan Rosenberg, a former senior vice-president of products at Google and current adviser to Google CEO Larry Page, provides an insight. Yet this is not just a book for geeks. We culled some tips that human resource (HR) managers need to mull on to connect better with their employees.

An open culture

How Google Works: by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, with Alan Eagle, Hachette India, 284 page, 650
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How Google Works: by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, with Alan Eagle, Hachette India, 284 page, 650

Sharing information

Trust is an integral part of the work culture, Schmidt and Rosenberg tell readers. What makes it truly successful is that it runs top-down. The company’s intranet, Moma, has all the information about every forthcoming product.

When he was the CEO, Schmidt started the process of presenting an in-depth report about the state of the business to the board every quarter. All the slides presented at the meetings were then shared with all the employees. This practice continues even today.

The weekly meetings are usually full of presentations by product teams to show others what they are working on, offering a glimpse of some of the forthcoming cool stuff. Don’t want to ask a question in person? Simply submit it on the online system called Dory, for discussion.

Picking the better idea

Schmidt and Rosenberg insist meritocracy is something that has been aggressively pushed at Google. The HiPPOs (highest paid person’s opinions) are dangerous for organizations. “It is the quality of the idea that matters, not who suggests it." In the early days of the Google AdWords product, Sridhar Ramaswamy, one of the product’s leaders, had a clash of ideas with Sergey Brin, the highest paid person in the room. In most organizations, Brin’s idea would have been accepted without opposition or counter-suggestion. But Ramaswamy believed his idea was better, and the organizational culture allowed for discussion. Eventually, after much deliberation, Brin’s idea was binned.

30 minutes at the most

On hiring, Schmidt and Rosenberg share examples of how the firm operates. Like the time some candidates were taken out for a meal and a couple of drinks, to observe their conduct “as civilians".

Obviously, a candidate is stressed before a job interview. A good interviewer is one who prepares—reads the résumé, prepares the questions and researches the interviewee. There should be a method to the madness, which is why job interviews at Google don’t last more than 30 minutes. And the same candidate is not interviewed more than four times—the thinking is that mean interview score accuracy levels off at around 85% after four interviews.

Building in flexibility

Apart from the number- and graph-driven decision making, there is enough flexibility to take tough decisions depending on the circumstances.

In December 2009, Chinese hackers attacked Google’s corporate servers in a series of attempts to steal data and gain access to the accounts of users, including human rights activists. Brin’s team of security experts shifted to an off-campus location, and monitored the attacks from there.

The “don’t be evil" motto was in evidence when Google disclosed, on 12 January 2010, the details of how its servers were attacked, the list of companies and high-profile individuals affected, and the decision to stop filtering search results on Google.cn (which the Chinese government had wanted all along). They knew that the Chinese authorities would not let Google.cn survive in that avatar for very long. The .cn service was shut down in March 2010.

Google’s then head of engineering, Alan Eustace, led the effort to rebuild the morale of the employees based on Chinese soil, ensured their safety, and stayed involved through the process.

For the entire time, a data-driven company was working on the human element.

A pinch of salt

Brin had always opposed Google’s entry into China but the other members, including top-level management as well as product teams, were in favour of the move in mid-2004—China, they believed, was a huge market waiting to be tapped.

It may actually be a stretch to believe Schmidt and Rosenberg when they claim that Google.cn was launched with “the hope of being able to change the information climate in China". The primary motive, as for any organization, is profit. Brin’s disapproval was based on his first-hand experience with closed communist regimes—he grew up in the Soviet Union.

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Published: 23 Nov 2014, 08:28 PM IST
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