The Google Enigma
The Innovators
comment the innovators
1
The Google Enigma
sented as a new model for business success. Reporters and scholars scour its history and its practices, looking to distill general lessons for other firms to copy. Google is no exception. Over the last two years, the workings of the company’s “idea factory,” as Business Week describes it, have been dissected in cover stories in all the major business magazines, and business school professors have published studies documenting how the company organizes and manages its product development efforts. In his new book, The Future of Management, London Business
School professor Gary Hamel calls
Google “a modern management pioneer” that “has much to teach us about how to build companies that are truly fit for the 21st century.”
That’s heady stuff, and it’s hard not to get caught up in the hype.
But business executives have at least two reasons to think twice before leaping aboard the Google bandwagon. First, for all its success,
Google is still a young company, and it has yet to be tested by adversity. We don’t even know whether its approach to management, and in particular its approach to innovation, is a cause of its success or a
strategy + business issue 49
Illustration by Lars Leetaru
his decade’s most remarkable business story has been the rise of Google from the dot-com ashes. The company didn’t even exist 10 years ago — it was incorporated by its founders, Stanford University graduate students Larry Page and Sergey
Brin, on September 7, 1998 — but it is today a juggernaut that is as feared as it is admired. The company’s growth has been dizzying, its revenues shooting up from less than
US$500 million in 2002 to more than $10.5 billion in 2006. And despite a prolonged hiring binge, an aggressive acquisition program, and a multibillion-dollar investment in building data centers, Google remains robustly profitable, earning a net income of $2
comment the innovators
1
The Google Enigma
sented as a new model for business success. Reporters and scholars scour its history and its practices, looking to distill general lessons for other firms to copy. Google is no exception. Over the last two years, the workings of the company’s “idea factory,” as Business Week describes it, have been dissected in cover stories in all the major business magazines, and business school professors have published studies documenting how the company organizes and manages its product development efforts. In his new book, The Future of Management, London Business
School professor Gary Hamel calls
Google “a modern management pioneer” that “has much to teach us about how to build companies that are truly fit for the 21st century.”
That’s heady stuff, and it’s hard not to get caught up in the hype.
But business executives have at least two reasons to think twice before leaping aboard the Google bandwagon. First, for all its success,
Google is still a young company, and it has yet to be tested by adversity. We don’t even know whether its approach to management, and in particular its approach to innovation, is a cause of its success or a
strategy + business issue 49
Illustration by Lars Leetaru
his decade’s most remarkable business story has been the rise of Google from the dot-com ashes. The company didn’t even exist 10 years ago — it was incorporated by its founders, Stanford University graduate students Larry Page and Sergey
Brin, on September 7, 1998 — but it is today a juggernaut that is as feared as it is admired. The company’s growth has been dizzying, its revenues shooting up from less than
US$500 million in 2002 to more than $10.5 billion in 2006. And despite a prolonged hiring binge, an aggressive acquisition program, and a multibillion-dollar investment in building data centers, Google remains robustly profitable, earning a net income of $2