THE METHODS BEHIND THE MYSTIQUE
check how we’re doing, and we’ve stayed pretty close to those [one-third] targets for the last seven years. Q. Google again topped Fortune’s list of the 100 best places to work in 2012 and has been in the top five since 2007. Why does Google go to such great
lengths
when you’re such a prestigious place to work anyway?
A. Te number one reason is, it’s just the right thing to do. You treat people the way you want to be treated, create a great environment that they want to be part of. What’s interesting is that most of the things we do don’t cost any money, or they cost very little. It’s hard to keep coming up with new stuff, but it doesn’t actually take that many resources. So every Tursday we have a company-wide meeting called TGIF, where the found- ers will stand up and say, “Tis is what happened this week,” and then there’s a no-holds-barred Q&A where you can ask any question you want, any question. And that costs nothing. It gives people in the company such a tremendous oppor- tunity to hear the founders speak, to see that they’re human, to see that that they’re brilliant and to see that employees have a voice in how the company works.
Tere’s a pragmatic reason, too, which is, if you think about it, talent movement
is becoming much more global, and it’s starting with the global elite—the people who have access to the best schools, the best companies, the people who are the most intellectually accomplished and have enough resources to be able to break out of wherever they are.
We have hundreds of people at Google who grew up in India and will tell you stories about how when they went to high school and college, there was one textbook that 20 of them shared, living in communal housing, and it was held together by twine, and they would pass it around at exam period, because that was the one textbook; nobody could afford to buy their own. And the people who did the best then found their way to the United States and then found their way to places like Google. Our head of sales, the chief business officer for the entire com- pany [Nikesh Arora], was one of these people. So what’s happening is, the best people on the planet are increasingly hav- ing more opportunity, and if you want to attract the best people on the planet and keep them, you do have to keep making your work environment better.
Q. How do you keep people growing intellectually and growing in the culture of the company, as opposed to “coasting,” for instance?
STARTING FROM A PLACE WHERE IT’S VERY STRUCTURED AND VERY REGULATED, YOU ONLY NEED TO DO VERY SMALL THINGS FOR PEOPLE TO EXPERIENCE IT AS TREMENDOUS FREEDOM.
A. Part of it is, we do look very closely at performance. We don’t force-rank or stack-rank, but we do periodically iden- tify people who are lower performers, which includes people who are
coast-
ing. We have an internal designation for people that we call “consistently low- meets.” So they’re consistently on the low end of meeting expectations. Whenever we see that, we reach out to them and say,
“What’s going on?” In most companies, the presumption is,
70 Army AL&T Magazine July–September 2013
Q. How do you define a person’s suc- cess,
in contrast with somebody who’s coasting?
A. It depends on what the job is. Tere are obvious, measurable aspects and less obvious, harder-to-measure aspects. If you’re a salesperson, we know how much
you fire these people. But from our per- spective, if we’ve done our job right in recruiting them and investing in them, they’re pretty good people. So you don’t want to fire them; what you want to do is understand what has happened that’s caused this great person to flatten out in their trajectory. And we help them get better at their job, or we move them into a new job. And if that doesn’t work, then we help them find something outside the company. But what we find is, 80 percent of the time, when you have one of these folks in one of these cases and they switch into a new job, performance gets much better; it reverts to the mean.
More broadly for the company, though, we just try to create an incredibly stim- ulating environment. So, for example, we have these things called Tech Talks (online at
http://www.youtube.com/ talksatgoogle). In any given week, we’ve got 50-plus talks happening all around Google. It’s people who’ve writ- ten books coming in to talk about their books; it’s political people coming in to talk about what they believe; it’s art- ists; it’s actors. And, as often as not, it’s Googlers standing up and presenting to other Googlers about what they’re doing and what they’re working on. Te idea is, it’s an hour of a week for somebody to do this, but it creates an environment where you’re constantly being stimulated with new ideas, challenged to learn and think in new ways. Tat, by the way, is another program that costs nothing. It just costs a little bit of time.
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