Google - Don't Be Evil

Abstract

McShane and Von Glinow (2010) define organization, or corporate, culture as "the values and assumptions shared within an organization" (p. 416). An organization's culture is made up of several different parts, all working together to create the culture as a whole. The values that the organization has are the shared beliefs that guide the preferences for outcomes and the courses of actions the organization takes when decisions are made (McShane, & Von Glinow). The shared assumptions of the organization are the "nonconscious, taken-for-granted perceptions or ideal prototypes of behavior that are considered the correct way to think and act toward problems and opportunities (McShane, & Von Glinow, p. 416). The physical structures of an organization are also part of its culture, as is the language and jargon that is spoken by employees to each other, the stories that are told about the organization and its rituals and ceremonies (McShane, & Von Glinow).

This paper will look at Google, Inc from its historic beginnings to its future while examining the company's internal and external strengths and weakness as well as its organizational culture and the artifacts that make up that culture. It will examine if Google's culture is the driving force behind its success, and how its culture, symbolized by its unofficial motto "don't be evil", coined by Google lead developer Paul Buchheit ("Google history,") has played a role in that success.

Background

In 1995 Larry Page, a East Lansing, Michigan native and recent graduate of the University of Michigan, headed to California to attend graduate school at Stanford University. As a computer science grad student, Page and fellow student Sergey Brin, a Russian immigrant who was perusing his PhD in computer science, created their first search engine, called BackRub, as a research project. Previously engines ranked results by counting how many times the search terms appeared on the page. Page and Brin, using Brin's data mining system, created a system that analyzed the relationships between websites. The website's relevance was determined by the number of pages that linked back to the original site. They called this technology PageRank, named after Larry (Brin, & Page), and it soon became so popular that Stanford shut BackRub down, citing that it was taking up too much bandwidth (Google history,").

Undaunted, they moved the operation to a rented garage and decided it was time to come up with a better name. By unintentionally misspelling the word googol, a mathematical term for the representation of the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, they came up with the company's name (Williamson, 2005). The term was mean to represent "their mission to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web" ("Google history,"). In fact, from the very beginning the company's mission statement had been "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful ("Google corporate information,").

By 1998 Google filed for incorporation with money given to them by Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim ("Google history,"). In December of that same year PC Magazine reported that Google "has an uncanny knack for returning extremely relevant results" (as cited in "Google history,"). The simplicity of the Google homepage was a result that:

The founders didn't know HTML and just wanted a quick interface. In fact, it was noted that the submit button was a long time coming and hitting the RETURN key was the only way to burst Google into life. (Williamson, 2005)

Because the interface is so basic, in the early days many users would often sit staring at the page waiting for the rest of it to load and not understanding that the simple design was all there was. This lead to Google adding the copyright at the bottom of the page as an indicator that the page was done loading (Williamson, 2005). By 1999 Page and Brin had decided that the search engine was taking too much time away from their academic studies and offered to sell the engine to Excite for $1 million, an offer the Excite CEO rejected. On June 7, 1999, a $25 million round of funding was announced from Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins. Google headquarters was also moved to their first Mountain View location, a few miles south of Stanford University ("Google history,").

On April 1, 2000, Google announces the MentalPlex, which was described as Google's ability to read your mind as you visualize the search results you want (Google's April fool's, 2000). This began the companies annual April Fool's day hoax, which has included such standouts as PigeonRank in 2002, describing how pigeons are used to determine search results, and Googlunaplex, their new research facility on the Moon in 2004 ("Google history,"). In June Google formed a partnership with Yahoo, to become that company's default search provider, later that month they announce the first billion-URL index and became the world's largest search engine, which number doubled to 3 billion by 2001.

Almost exactly five years after Google announced it $25 million round of funding, its initial public offering (IPO) took place on August 19, 2004. The company offered 19.6 million shares at a price of $85 per share (Elgin, 2004). Cynthia Webb, a reporter for the Washington Post wrote that Google's market value of $23 billion is "less than originally expected, but still impressive for a 6-year-old dot-com dreamed up in a garage" (as cited in Webb, 2004). She went on to write that three weeks earlier the company had hoped to raise just $3.6 billion (Webb, 2004). Because of the IPO there was concern that Google's unique company culture would suffer. Many felt that shareholder pressures for a reduction in employee benefits as well as the increased level of scrutiny necessary for a public company would make it impossible for the company to continue with its unique culture. In a letter to investors, Page and Brin stated, "as a private company, we have concentrated on the long term, and this has served us well. As a public company, we will do the same" (Olsen, & Kawamoto, 2004). They also appointed a Chief Culture Officer to work with employees throughout the company to determine ways to maintain, enhance, and develop the company's culture (Mills, 2007). The CCO wanted "all our employees to play a part in being involved in keeping our culture the way it is today but also growing and developing it" (as cited in Mills, 2007). Also during that