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Can Google’s winning ways be applied to all kinds of businesses? The authors of “How Google Works,” ( http://www.howgoogleworks.net/ ) Eric Schmidt, Google’s former chief executive, and Jonathan Rosenberg, a former senior product manager at Google, firmly believe that they can.
The critical ingredient, they argue in their new book, is to build teams, companies and corporate cultures around people they call “smart creatives.” These are digital-age descendants of yesterday’s “knowledge workers,” a term coined in 1959 by Peter Drucker, the famed management theorist.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/the-google-formula-for-success/
Do people of SN agree that such success can be replicated in diverse environments, diverse cultures? Or, is Google's success one of a kind?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by brocksampson on Tuesday September 30 2014, @03:06PM
I know a lot of people who worked (as scientists) at Bell Labs from various generations spanning the 60's through the 2000's and from the old-timers tell me, your first model is very close to how they actually operated. Basically, if you didn't want the political overhead of the Academy and thought you had really great ideas, you could try your luck at Bell Labs. There was basically no management (of scientists) and your budget was as big as you could justify. You had a finite amount of time to show results, but it wasn't super critical what those results were; they were pursing the "infinite horizon" model of essentially acting as an incubator for motivated scientists to generate discoveries that could be built on. Most of the driving force there was ego and competition with your peers. When they started tightening budgets and bringing in managers to direct research towards predefined problems a lot of their talent jumped ship and became (usually very successful) professors.
I had a very different experience at IBM in the early 2000's. They fostered the illusion of the old Bell Labs model, but in reality all of the scientists had to interface with "corporate" via managers who were trained scientists (usually). But above them it was just suits and MBAs. You could have a very successful project cut because you missed a milestone (a ridiculous concept in scientific research) or because it no longer fit into the "strategic vision." In an environment like that you get the distinct impression that you are viewed as an interchangeable part and a line item on a budget by people who aren't even intellectually curious enough to want to try to understand what it is you do for the company. I would love for there to be more Google-like companies for scientists, but the old Bell Labs model seems to be a casualty of quarterly profit-driven mentalities. The conventional wisdom has become that science is too expensive and is better farmed out to universities.
I guess the take home lesson for me is that smart, creative scientists are pushed out of Industry and into the Academy by MBAs. I'm happy that places like Google exist for engineers and computer scientists. You may still find excitement and freedom at a start up, but you have to commit to a very uncertain future.