Google's original goal was simple: provide all the worlds information quickly and cleanly, and do so while “doing no evil.” That goal has broadened somewhat. While the company still maintains it wants to be ethical, its market position has gone from upstart to near monopoly, with Google’s search engine controlling near 80% of the marketplace. This kind of dominance has led to speculation that Googlism, or Google’s organizational philosophy, may be contagious:
“Technology and strategy at Google are inseparable and mutually permeable, making it difficult to determine whether technology is the basis of its strategy or vice versa. Either way, Google may be the Internet-era heir to such firms as General Electric and IBM as an exemplar of management practice.” (Lyer p. 58.)
What are these values that have proved so successful? According to Google’s chief culture officer of culture, Stacy Sullivan, the company’s core values are: a flat organization, a lack of hierarchy, and a collaborative environment. Despite competition from giants like Microsoft and Yahoo!, Google has shown democracy really can work.
A Turbulent Marketplace
Google thrives in a turbulent and highly competitive marketplace. Maintaining the robustness of Google's search engine is crucial to boosting its prospects as a business. In the 11-year history of the World Wide Web, the fortunes of portal and search engine companies have traced a sickening parabolic arc. Companies like Ask Jeeves, Lycos, Inktomi, Excite, and AltaVista (part of CMGI) have gone public and seen their shares soar to triple digits- only to plummet to single digits. (Wells 27)
Google has continued to build market share, despite the low barriers for entry from competitors. It is telling that Google fears more from Anti-trust law than it does from competition. Their superior search algorithm form a sort of natural monopoly, which in a top-heavy and service oriented industry, has lead to dominance.
What makes Google so successful and allows them to maintain this market share is the proprietary technology they possess and their willingness to constantly innovate their search algorithm. They quite literally rely on analysis and innovation, and could not be a better fit on the strategy scale for that description.
Result Oriented
At the heart of Google’s strategy and culture is the end-user result, which is its search engine's effectiveness before the consumer. (Jarvis p. 26) Despite all their ambitious apps and new-fangled ideas, Google remains a company that relies on advertising for 99% of its revenue, and its search engine for all its advertising. What this translates to is a company policy that the customer is king.
Beyond user experience, Google has few higher priorities. The willingness of a customer to click on advertising links provided to them by the search engine is directly proportional to the desire of advertises to pay Google for their placements. In order to achieve success, both design and engineering teams must work in reciprocally interdependent groups to create results. Each team must work with enough autonomy to preserve the integrity of their ideas, but those ideas must be compatible enough to fit into Google’s nominal workflow.
Jeff Jarvis. (2009,January 27) What would Google do? Collins Business 1-272
Ed Welles, Maggie Overfelt. (2002, September). All the right moves. FSB : Fortune Small Business, 12(7), 24-32
Iyer, B., & Davenport, T. (2008). Reverse Engineering Google's Innovation Machine. Harvard Business Review, 86(4), 58-68
Google Inc. (15 June). Hoover's Company Records,5910
Greg Johansson - Gregory Johansson has been a Web marketing consultant for nearly a decade and has published copy on dozens of websites ranging from online ...
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