Fostering a Culture of Innovation at Google

I went to a talk today from Lucinda Barlow, Head of Marketing at Google Australia and New Zealand, who did a great speech on how Google has been able to create the world class culture they have with their key focus on constant innovation.

Here are my notes from what she had covered. Some of this might be a bit inaccurate as I took notes on my phone which ended up a bit messy.

• Every employee in Google are driven to innovate
• There are 400 employees in Google Australia
• The founders values (Brin and Page) are ingrained in the company’s culture from the very start
• Google have a ‘Day of Liberation’ where a group of engineers work across all products in the company and put in the features that allows end users to easily leave a Google product. Although this might sound counter-intuitive from Google’s point of view, by making it easy for customers to leave any product this pushes Google further to innovate so the products are great enough that people won’t leave them.
• The company is entirely based on trust
• Google has made 2 major bets for the future ahead: Cloud and Mobile!
• Google’s job is to always look 2 years ahead when innovating, to be in front of the competition
• Hire for innovation! 30% of a managers time is spent recruiting people as this has a very important affect on the company’s long term
• Hire generalists, people with passion, diversity. Would hire people in completely unrelated fields but did something to stand out, such as worked a long time in a charity, chess champion, started a business at 13 years of age etc
• She talked about Google’s 20% time, how the products Gmail and Google News spawned from this. Ideas will go ahead from idea stage if they have good potential.
• Google has 20% pitch fairs, where employees pitch their ideas to management in a Dragon’s Den style, and usually 2 ideas are chosen from these.
• Google’s main focus is on the user. When Google has the choice to make more revenue or benefit the user, they will always choose the user. For example, She is asked almost daily to take advantage of Google’s home page to put advertisements on it. They will never do this even though Google’s home page is the world’s most visited page and would bring a huge amount of revenue.
• Google will still do what benefits the user first even if this means their competitors doing something first.
• For products, getting out there quick and iterating frequently is key
• Larry Page said ‘Think Big’ which is for every employee to take in mind when coming up with new ideas. Mindset is to think big. Google would rather implement an idea that would gain 1 million customers or make $1 billion then do many small ideas which may return $10 million each or bring small benefits.
• Google has several values, I was able to take down just some of them:
  • Technical perspective – take a technical perspective on things
  • Open web – open source is the right way
  • Allow failure – if people are punished for failing, they won’t risk making ideas which can end up big
• Open source means making innovative ideas faster, including internally. For example, if one team made an open source application and another team is building a similar application, both can leverage off the open source application and finish their products faster as both teams can share.
• Important to get different perspectives on ideas
• People are actually so passionate sometimes with their 20% project, that they will work outside of hours and even bring the project home to work on it.
• What if people spend their 20% time on a project which has nothing to do with Google or brings them benefit? I didn’t understand the entire answer well, but part of it was that ideas will be looked at by others and only if it has legs it will go ahead into implementation phase. Ideas need to be backed by conviction and even data to support it.
• 25% of people in the US access the internet through their smartphone. The Australian figure was unknown.
• 1/5 searches on Google are related to location.
• Lucinda was asked if Google has become too big and therefore is not getting things done fast anymore due to things such as bureaucracy, since Lars (Google Maps, Wave inventor) had just left Google for Facebook. She responded by saying even if their company has become big, they aim to act small and they still place entrepreneurial aspects into new areas such as Google TV.
• Google only markets the successful ideas. Smaller ideas are usually just released from the hundreds of blogs across Google.
• New ideas are also usually ‘dogfed’ internally, meaning they are fed to internal employees first to test them out depending on who wants to try it out.
• Google on average releases 50-100 new products or improvements a week.
• New ideas are usually championed by the person who came up with it. One interesting way on how teams are build on these new ideas is when employees meet up in the canteen. Due to its large open area giving the opportunity for many to meet, those other employees who are interested in the idea can discuss with the champion and even join him to execute the idea.