How Google Has Changed Management, 10 Years After its IPO

Google went public 10 years ago today, and since then has dramatically changed the way the world accesses information. It has also helped shape the practice of management. Staying true to its roots as an engineering-centric company, Google has stood out both for its early skepticism of the value of managers as well as for its novel, often quantitative approaches to management decisions. Along the way it became famous for its reliance on exceedingly difficult interview questions — later abandoned — and its “20% time” policy — reportedly on its way out.

In honor of the company’s milestone, here’s a reading list of some of the best things we’ve published on the company since its founding in 1998.

How Google manages

If you only read one piece, make it this one by David Garvin in 2013, on how Google sold its engineers on management. (You can listen to Garvin interview Google manager Eric Clayberg in our podcast if you’d prefer.) Also from the Garvin piece, here’s what getting feedback at Google looks like.

The company faced a challenge in convincing its employees that management was actually valuable. To do so, it had to come up with a brand of management all its own, centered around “people analytics,” a quantitative approach to hiring and operations.

Earlier this year, Google’s SVP of People Operations, Laszlo Bock, wrote about its latest “people analytics” experiment. gDNA is a longitudinal survey of Google employees on everything from happiness to teamwork to office layout. Results will take years to collect, but Bock offers a window into the company’s quantitative approach to management and shares some stats on work-life balance at Google.

20% time

From early on, Google employees were encouraged to spend a significant portion of their time on interesting side projects, with the idea that some of these projects would become new products. Both Gmail and AdSense, the company’s ad software for publishers, started out as 20% time projects. But back in 2010, Chris Trimble criticized 20% time both for being expensive and for emphasizing ideas over execution. Writing last year, amid reports that the company was ending the policy, Michael Schrage took a slightly different view, arguing that 20% time is great for some employees but not for others. As for deciding who gets it? He suggested letting the data decide, an approach Google could no doubt get on board with.

How Google innovates

Bala Iyer and Tom Davenport attempted to “reverse engineer” Google’s innovation machine in 2008. The first step to innovating like Google, they argue, is patience. Not just a long-term outlook, but the investment that goes with it to set up the infrastructure — technical and managerial — that makes innovation possible. From there, the authors offer advice including building innovation into job descriptions, and trusting users to inform product strategy.

This emphasis on organizational structure comes up again in a 2014 piece by Linda Hill, Greg Brandeau, Emily Truelove, and Kent Lineback that looks at Google as an example of innovating continually over time. Key traits of innovative organizations like Google include the ability to learn from experiments and to combine “disparate and even opposing ideas.”

In 2011, Rita McGrath echoed another one of Iver and Davenport’s points: the importance of failure.In her post, McGrath recaps 11 product failures by Google over the years to emphasize the importance of taking such risks.

Another look at part of Google’s innovation strategy comes from a 2013 piece on DARPA, the government research agency. The authors are ex-DARPA leaders now running an innovation group at Motorola Mobility, which Google acquired in 2012. At DARPA and now at Google, the authors are focused on the rare form of innovation — described below as “Pasteur’s quadrant” — that simultaneously expands scientific knowledge and seeks to meet a specified societal need.

What Google could do better

Not everyone is so enthused. In 2011, Joshua Gans used Google+ to argue that the company was now playing catchup in key areas. In 2008, Scott Anthony surveyed Google’s innovation track record and concluded that its new products mostly hadn’t delivered results, and therefore Google was still fundamentally a search advertising company.

Eric Schmidt and “adult supervision”

Another management legacy associated with Google is the idea of bringing in an older executive to rein in young founders. Google wasn’t the first example (see: Apple) but the meme is closely linked to former CEO Eric Schmidt’s role at the company. In 2011, Julia Kirby argued that such arrangements will increasingly become common, while Michael Schrage made the case that they emphasize the wrong things about running a business.

Schmidt himself recounted part of his experience at Google in a 2010 article, which describes at length the company’s “quirky” Dutch auction IPO. And when he eventually left the CEO role, HBR editor-in-chief Adi Ignatius recalled past interviews with the founders as evidence of the inevitability of his departure.

Business in the age of Google

Google hasn’t just changed management by virtue of its own practices. Its very existence has dramatically changed the way lots of companies do business. A 2009 piece by Andrei Hagiu and David Yoffie asks “What’s Your Google Strategy?”, and describes tactics firms can use to succeed in an online world dominated by powerful platforms.

Glass, and where Google goes next

Lately, lots of talk about the company’s future has revolved around Google Glass. James Wilson explained last year why he doesn’t think Glass is the future of wearables. Earlier this year, Michael Schrage used Glass as a case study of how not to roll out an innovative new product. And I wrote about the tension between Google’s core strategy as a consumer technology company, and Glass’s potential as an enterprise product.

That’s just a sampling. A look through our archive confirms the outsized role that Google has played in defining what an innovative company looks like. More has been written about the firm than anyone has time to read, but thanks to the company’s eponymous search engine it’s all easy to find.

Harvard Business Review