Why Google Rocks?

By Ernie A. Cevallos

Management à la Google

Worldwide best seller business writer of “Competing for the Future” and strategy and management professor extraordinaire, Gary Hamel, just offered his observations about the greatness of Google in a WSJ opinion article. Will it fizzle before it realizes all its growth potential? Has it realized the promise of its business model as its stock soared to over $425/share and its market cap reached $126B, and settle into maturity much like Dell, Microsoft, and many others?


Well, hardly because the innovativeness of this unique company is for real, given an ingrained culture of constant dissatisfaction with the status-quo since its inception in 1998. One of the components of their corporate philosophy “Great Just isn’t Good Enough” is ultimately a driving force behind the world’s best search engine. With that in mind, in our better, cheaper and faster world, it requires great vision and rapid adaptation to change in order to score consistently on the growth metric, which is one of the most important measurements of a management team effectiveness. Mr. Hamel points out clearly that “What the laggards have failed to grasp is that what matters most today is not a company’s competitive advantage at a point in time, but its evolutionary advantage over time. Google gets this”.

Google’s innovative management approach represents a unique advantage that in today’s fast pace helps to guard against the threats or risk factors, which undermine the evolutionary potential of a company:

• Evolutionary risk factor #1: A narrow or orthodox business definition that limits the scope of innovation. Google's response: An expansive sense of purpose
• Evolutionary risk factor #2: A hierarchical organization that over-weights the views of those who have a stake in perpetuating the status quo. Google's response: An organization that is flat, transparent, and non-hierarchical
• Evolutionary risk factor #3: A tendency to overinvest in "what is" at the expense of "what could be." Google's response: A company-wide rule that allows developers to devote 20% of their time to any project they choose
• Evolutionary risk factor #4: Creeping mediocrity. Google's response: Keep the bozos out and reward people who make a difference

Will Google grow unweedable corporate weed, and commit the mistakes that uninspired laggards have made. The market is not betting that to be the case anytime soon. Mr. Hamel commented “…But that's not the way I'd bet. Google seems to have grasped the new century's most important business lesson: The capacity to evolve is the most important advantage of all.”

For the whole opinion article, please follow link:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114601763677436091.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries