A lot has been written about Google (point of note: I’m talking about the company – their approach/culture and so on – not the “products”), most (if not all) of it good – at least up until now. Something that has been missed in this avalanche of positive press has been the effect that the perception of Google has had on the psyche of others – both companies and individuals.
In the face of such overwhelming success everyone is clamouring to emulate Google. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that it is a bad thing – I think that everyone can learn a lot from the perception of the way Google goes about things. Open Box is no different – in fact I have heard a lot of people comment that we are the “Google of Cape Town” and I think that is quite cool!
The point that I think a lot of people miss (and you will notice that I have used the word liberally thus far) is that it is the *perception* of Google that everyone clamours after as opposed to the reality. An example? Well a good one is one that came up in a discussion in the office the other day is the “entirely flat organizational structure” of Google. Now the perception that people like to put on this is that there is Larry, Sergey and Eric and then the next level is the rest of the 10,000 odd people in Google. Let’s take look at it from another direction. Google teams are (apparently) made up of around 3 people, one of which is the team lead. If we say the whole company works this way (for simplicity sake), doing the simple math gives us over 3,000 team leads. Since I know how difficult / impossible it is to have even a whole team of 50 people “reporting” / getting guidance (or however else you like to put it) from me, I doubt that Larry etc. can handle 3,000 – a sort of Father Christmas on Christmas Eve scenario. All of which speaks to a lot more than a “flat” structure.
To paraphrase something that you to be said of Steve Jobs: there is a “reality distortion field” surrounding Google. Distortion or not, this perception is still a very worthy goal to strive towards and it is this influence that I believe will be Google’s greatest legacy of our generation.
