Saving Googleyness
As business booms, executives at the search goliath are struggling to preserve their quirky, noncorporate culture
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Even here in Silicon Valley, renowned for its lavish perks and high-tech hijinks, Internet search goliath Google Inc. stands out for its extravagance.
Employees call themselves "Googlers" and navigate the sprawling Googleplex campus -- past cactus gardens, volleyball nets, and a bronze-cast Tyrannosaurus rex surrounded by pink flamingos -- on company scooters or bicycles with baskets designed to hold laptops. They bounce on exercise balls in meetings, swim in counter-current pools during breaks, and down shots of espresso or wheat grass juice after lunch.
But while business is booming for Google, these are anxious times for the company behind the unadorned search box that's become an indispensable tool for tens of millions of people worldwide: Its explosive growth threatens to dilute its distinctively quirky culture.
"We still want to attract the same kinds of people," said Stacy Sullivan , recently anointed as Google's "chief culture officer," whose duties include transplanting the company's ideals, and lava lamps, to new far-flung outposts in places like Ireland, Israel, and Russia. "We can't ask someone if they're a 'Googley' person. But we want people who are flexible, non hierarchical, non political, collaborative, and fun."
Google also wants to retain long time employees who got shares in the company's 2004 initial public offering and are now cashing in their stock options, and to guard against the complacency that has slowed one-time highfliers like IBM Corp. and Microsoft Corp.
Toward that end, Sullivan is meeting with Googlers around the planet in an effort to keep the focus on fun and innovation and prevent "cultural bugs" -- like bureaucratic holdups or obsession with status -- from creeping into this corporate Shangri-La. The company will soon roll out an online program that will invite Googlers to identify stresses on the system and suggest fixes.
"It's similar to what our engineers do with bugs," Sullivan said. "People can report bugs they're seeing within the culture or things that are looking too 'big company.' "
For a company whose mission is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," Google executives are guarded in discussing their own business and strategy, though it's no secret the company is grappling with growing pains. Google has more than doubled its global workforce during the past 18 months and now employs more than 12,000, about half of them here.
Earlier this month the company added video, news, images, maps, and other features to its main search results, unveiling a universal search site with the potential to further accelerate its growth.
"You have to wonder, when a company's adding people as fast as Google, how they're going to control it," said Charles A. O'Reilly III , management professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in Palo Alto.
Maintaining the mix of karma and iconoclasm forged by Google's billionaire founders Larry Page , 34, and Sergey Brin , 33, in their Stanford University dormitory and the requisite Valley garage in the 1990s is a goal that's preoccupied Google for years. The founders, in registering for their IPO, promised would-be investors that "Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one."
Perhaps the greatest fear of Google's culture czars is losing their edge as the company ages and solidifies its dominance in Internet search and advertising. Aware that software behemoth Microsoft Corp., which ruled the technology roost in the 1990s, relied too heavily on its computer operating system, Google is aggressively supplementing its search engine with new products, including an Internet software suite called Google Apps and a retail pay service called Checkout.
Google is also tinkering with its employee incentives, offering restricted stock with immediate value to new hires and transferable stock options that let outsiders bid on vested but unexercised employee options and pay more then their current value. The company aims to create more flexibility and avoid the trap seen at competitors like Microsoft where many older workers who were rich on stock options cashed out, leaving younger workers resentful they had come to the party too late.
Despite a market value of $150.64 billion, and a share price of $483.52 on the Nasdaq, this is a company at which receptionists greet new hires with bouquets of multi colored balloons emblazoned with smiley faces and employees still compete in foosball tournaments and throw pajama parties to celebrate new software releases. And if the workplace seems a bit chaotic, well, that's just fine with Brin, the Google president of technology.
"I think chaos is important in the right context," Brin, wearing a red cycling shirt, told a "Searchology" press briefing here. "We've always tried to run our company with 10 or 20 percent chaos."
Mathematical formulas are a staple of corporate life at Google. Managers employ a 70/20/10 rule for organizing their engineers' time, with 70 percent devoted to core search activities, 20 percent to related functions such as the Google e-mail program called Gmail, and the remaining 10 percent on new, unrelated businesses.
Non engineer Googlers are urged to spend 20 percent of their time on blue-sky projects. Among the fruits of this "20 percent time" have been Google News, the Google social networking site Orkut, and an in-house program in which the company leases a fleet of commuter buses, complete with wireless Internet connections, to ferry workers to and from homes from San Francisco to Santa Cruz.
Life at Google is pampered by the standards of almost any other company. T-shirts and shorts are typical work clothes, and Hawaiian shirts are among the most formal attire. Googlers shoot pool, relax in massage chairs, or work out in a gym. And, on Fridays, there are almost always live bands playing music at the Googleplex.
Then there are the 14 cafes scattered about the Googleplex, serving three gourmet meals a day free of charge and vying with one another to draw the most Googlers. The pan-Asian Pacific Cafe is festooned with thatched umbrellas and rice paper lanterns. At the organic No Name Cafe, the lunch offerings on a weekday earlier this month included braised rabbit, white bass, and Santa Ana tri-tips.
Even with all the perks, Silicon Valley veterans think Google will struggle to sustain its rate of expansion. They recall the history of other Valley shooting stars, from Apple Inc. to Cisco Systems Inc.
"We've seen this movie before," O'Reilly said. "At this growth rate, how long will it take before Google owns the whole world? Well, that won't happen. So at some point they'll have to slow down."
Robert Weisman can be reached at weisman@globe.com. 