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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) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Monday September 29 2014, @02:33PM
What exactly is the "formula" for success, other than being first? All things are usually equal with talent and drive, and the successful people are usually ones who are at the right place at the right time. I don't think they're able to predict the future, I think that a whole lot of random people try a lot of random things, and some catch on when societal shifts take place. Most technology successes are from companies at the right place at the right time to be first and establish a new market. Microsoft (provided IBM with a 16-bit OS at the dawn of the commodity PC era), Netscape (the first commercial browser at the dawn of the mass Internet era), Google (early search engine at a time when most web indexes were directories), and others come to mind. (Even Alibaba is a company that came along at a specific point in time when they could be first in their market.) I see very little linkage between what people do and success, and I have never seen a formula that would work for anyone.
Remember that winners write history. A success "formula" from a business person or coach is written by a winner, and never seems to take into account all the people who tried the same thing and failed. Successful people and companies are extreme outliers, and by their very nature there's no way to duplicate their success. Not everyone can be an extreme outlier. People who see Bill Gates or Google, or read books about them, don't put them into perspective as extreme outliers who defied the odds.
PS - Does anyone but me find it bizarre that people from Google would write a ... book? How 19th century of them. If their success is formulaic, then why not use their own Google talks and YouTube to share their message so everyone can succeed? Why do they want to sell a book? They're already rich. Why not let the universe in on their formula so everyone can be successful?
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 1) by Buck Feta on Monday September 29 2014, @02:49PM
> What exactly is the "formula" for success, other than being first? All things are usually equal with talent and drive, and the successful people are usually ones who are at the right place at the right time.
This is exactly how I feel about John Coltrane, Marie Curie, Picasso, Issac newton, Shakespeare, and Archimedes.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 29 2014, @03:05PM
That's a good point. One could argue that Yahoo! was actually the first to grasp the business potential of a web portal. And Google wasn't the first with text search either.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by forsythe on Monday September 29 2014, @03:10PM
Leibniz would not appreciate your sarcasm.
(Score: 1) by Buck Feta on Monday September 29 2014, @03:13PM
Neither would Dexter Wallman.
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(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday September 29 2014, @03:24PM
Newton invents calc = original submarine patent
Invents, files, keeps it secret, Leibniz invents it independently and newton's all "plagarizer!" and releases the patent lawyers with their submarine patent and 400 years later, just like SCO, they still won't give it a rest. You snooze you loose, Newton.
Newton was a pretty cool bro-mathematician other than the whole patent trolling Leibniz thing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 01 2014, @01:35PM
I remember hanging our with Newton late at night in his lab. We'd get high on fumes and try to turn lead into gold!
Good times.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 29 2014, @03:47PM
Also what works at google does not necessarily work everywhere.
It works at google because they built their culture around it. It would not necessarily translate somewhere else.
Basically fish swim in water it does not translate that they can fly thru the air very well and a bird does not necessarily swim thru water very well. They are a product of their environment. Where making a mistake means someone clicked on the wrong web page. But for someone like GM a mistake means they made 2 million wrong things and costs millions of dollars to fix and maybe a few people died.
Mistakes vs cost drives the type of business you have. As it depends on the kinds of easy mistakes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 29 2014, @05:21PM
Google wasn't first. AltaVista was out in front of them by quite a bit, and I don't think AltaVista was first either.
Yahoo wasn't first. The YA stood for Yet Another, after all.
Netscape was first, and they went bust.
Facebook wasn't first. Whatever happened to Friendster?
Microsoft wasn't first. CP/M was; Microsoft had better license negotiators.
The world is full of successful companies that weren't first.