Nimble, Focused, Feisty. Sara Roberts
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expand and grow. The flow of information between those silos and layers is strictly controlled, and everyone must do exactly what he or she is supposed to do for the system to function efficiently. When that happens, scale pays off—literally. Margins do not need to be high in order to accrue tremendous profit in such a system.
Is the work engaging? Probably not, or at least not until you reach a level in the hierarchy that gives you a different kind of challenge—managing people instead of processes or overseeing processes that are more complex and strategic. Does the work require creativity, innovation, or passion? Again, not much until you get to higher levels. Creative impulses on the shop floor could throw a wrench into the works and bring the efficient machine to a screeching halt. On the other hand, in these big-is-better companies there is a lot of creativity needed in the marketing department. It’s necessary, after all, to artfully convince consumers that the same product they can get anywhere—one that is not very different from a product they can get from a competitor—actually is meaningful and desirable enough to buy. Why else would you drink Pepsi and not Coke, drive a Chevy and not a Ford, or fill your tank with one particular brand of gasoline over another? The subtle differences between these products must be branded as loudly and brashly as possible.
Naturally, companies that believe big is better than fast have a bias for unbridled growth. What’s better than a store, gas station, or dealership in every city? Answer: a store, gas station, or dealership on every corner. All growth is good because it leverages efficiencies of process, resources, production, delivery, marketing, etc. Revenues and profits grow incrementally at scale as a result.
In a VUCA world, however, the dynamics of markets, competition, capital, employees, and technology have radically changed the rules of the game. As we discussed in chapter one, a company built to make the same product over and over again will not be able to meet diverse needs, or adapt quickly to changes in the market, or respond with agility to the disruptive innovations of new competitors, or engage younger generations of employees and customers who have different priorities and values. Meanwhile, capital and consumers will be drawn quickly to upstart companies that design better processes or fulfill different needs or bring new technologies to bear. Blockbuster, meet Netflix.
Does it sound strange to hear that Google—the behemoth of the internet—prizes being fast over being big? In fact, Google has gone to great lengths to design a work environment that enables agility and fluidity in all its processes and decisions, and actively encourages informal collaboration over formal organization. Most pointedly, it is fanatical in its resistance to the natural and insidious takeover of the company’s culture by conventional rules of management (which are the default mode for responding to almost any confusion, complexity, challenge, or need, as Netflix noted) and the growth of hierarchical chains of command. Why? Because it believes those forces are responsible for slowing down big organizations and making them more cumbersome, inflexible, and unresponsive while killing innovation, passion, and engagement. These are not ideological or ethical arguments to Google but practical ones. Google believes that a culture built on the mindset that fast is better than big serves its strategic aims and will continue to drive the success of the company for the foreseeable future.
There’s good logic behind that mindset. Google creates products that are highly valued by users and customers, but those products can also be duplicated by rivals and new upstarts. So Google works to sustain product excellence through constant improvement and innovation as a way of fending off the competition. In other words, the same product can’t be produced in the same way over and over again at scale and still be successful. Note that Google relies very little on marketing or advertising to make its case with customers and users. It lets the product speak for itself.
Google encourages people to come up with ideas, innovations, and improvements beyond the task at hand because it believes those unplanned outcomes could potentially be bigger and more profitable than anything Google is devoted to doing currently.
Google also understands, better than most companies, that markets can change overnight. Accordingly, it maintains a looseness around assigned responsibilities that allows employees to do work beyond their job description. Instead of forcing people to keep their heads down and “stick to their knitting,” Google encourages people to come up with ideas, innovations, and improvements beyond the task at hand because it believes those unplanned outcomes could potentially be bigger and more profitable than anything Google is devoted to doing currently.
Fundamentally, this mindset is rooted in a profound understanding of the modern dynamics of markets, of what organizations are capable of doing well versus what they don’t do well, and of how employees are best motivated and empowered to contribute to organizational goals. Google’s founders, Page and Brin, did not come from management or business backgrounds and they saw this as a virtue, not a defect. As creative engineers themselves, they knew what conditions fostered good work from such people. In fact, they looked to academia and the college campus, of all things, as ideal models for the type of organizational looseness they wanted to instill in Google. They believed that Google would only thrive and grow if they were able to “hire as many talented software engineers as possible and give them freedom.”3 So they set out to make Google an attractive center for world-class thinkers who then had the time and space to collaborate in an appealing environment, where interactions could occur frequently and in unplanned ways.
To make this possible, they believed it necessary to “reinvent the rules of management”4 and remove the barriers of hierarchy, budgeting, and industrial-era management and oversight. They were contemptuous of formal planning because they believed it does not promote high-quality outcomes but a kind of stubborn, institutional adherence to an inflexible path. They also abhorred the status that gives workers with seniority and tenure more say than others. In their new hires, Google looked for people who were smarter and more capable than current employees and leaders. Anyone could win an argument as long as the reasoning was persuasive. Management levels were flattened. Top executives were never pandered to, and did not get the distinctively better office with the great view. Instead, space was used in a pragmatic way according to the needs of various projects or teams. Meetings were kept small, spontaneous, and fun. Leaders made as few decisions and exercised as little power as possible. Information was allowed to be free-flowing rather than restricted and directed up the food chain.
Brin and Page wanted a culture of Yes at Google, and they disrupted any force within the company inclined to say No. For example, many of us in corporate America have experienced disappointment when bold ideas and inspiring plans get thwarted, watered down, or made pointless by another division or level of management within the organization. The guiltiest department is typically legal, with finance trailing in a close second. Google saw the typical legal department as too risk-averse and negative to fit within the Google culture, so it hired lawyers who were willing to be creative contributors on business and product teams rather than gatekeepers blocking great ideas.5
The results have been extraordinary. Google has experienced unprecedented growth in a short time. But that growth arc does not resemble the slow and methodical approach of traditional companies. Rather Google is able to embrace a “grow big fast” strategy by identifying and seizing opportunities quickly, mobilizing with agility to take advantage, and achieving scale rapidly. This approach to innovation and growth occurs in an atmosphere characterized by a certain degree of chaos, disorganization, and spontaneity—a complaint or criticism that Schmidt and Rosenberg respond to by quoting race-car driver Mario Andretti: “If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.”6
MINDSET #2: POSSIBILITY OVER PROFITABILITY
“As a private company,” Brin and Page continued in their founders’ letter, “we have concentrated on the long term, and this has served us well. As a public company, we will do the same. In our opinion, outside pressures too often tempt companies to sacrifice long-term opportunities to meet quarterly and market expectations . . . If opportunities arise that might cause us to sacrifice short term results but are in the best long term interest of our shareholders, we will take those opportunities. We will have the fortitude to do this. We would request that our shareholders take the long term