Good Enough is Good Enough

Moving onto the google portion of this class we have started to read I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59. This book gives a personal behind the scenes tour of Douglas Edwards' experience with Google from its start-up beginnings. Douglas Edwards was the first director of marketing and brand management for Google and wrote this book because we was "the word guy". While most of Google's employees were engineers, he had a background in English. So, from his perspective, he was the only one that really could write this book because everyone else were engineers.

Rather than detailing the history of Google from 1999-2005 (the times Edwards worked at Google), Edwards gives the account of his personal story. He includes his own emotions and explains the personality of the company and the people that built it, including the creators Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Above is a picture of the two creators of Google, Larry Page (left) and Sergey Brin (right).

While reading this book, you can't help but to compare it to the book of Steve Jobs written by Walter Issacson. It is interesting to compare Google and the creators of this company, to Apple and its creator, Steve Jobs.

Steve Jobs was a perfectionist. He prided himself in delivering the highest quality products. He never released anything that was less than 110% ready. However, Edwards describes the philosophy of Google as "Good enough is good enough." He goes on to explain, "In those five words [Urs Holzle] encapsulated a philosophy for solving problems, cutting through complexity, and embracing failure." (pg. 128)

While both Apple and Google only hire people that can contribute to their A-teams, the inner workings of the companies couldn't be more different. In opposition to the hierarchical work atmosphere of Apple, Edwards describes the work atmosphere of Google in the terms of Larry's Rules.

Larry's Rules of Order

• Don’t delegate: Do everything you can yourself to make things go faster.

• Don’t get in the way if you’re not adding value. Let the people actually doing the work talk to each other while you go do something else. Don’t be a bureaucrat.

• Ideas are more important than age. Just because someone is a junior doesn’t mean they don’t deserve respect and cooperation.

• The worst thing you can do is stop someone from doing something by saying “No. Period.” If you say no, you have to help them find a better way to get it done.

(pg. 123)

To simplify these rules, Edwards sums up the goals of Google to be "Efficiency, Frugality, Integrity" (pg. xiv). He describes Google as a "Don't talk. Do." kind of culture (pg. xv) He explains, "we shouldn't do things the way we had in the past. We shouldn’t copy other companies. We shouldn’t expect to be informed about our strategy, if in fact there was one. We were independent actors, building a cohesive team of nonconformists. I thought I understood: I needed to identify problems and solve them. And so I did.”

It's interesting to compare the differences of the inner-workings of both these companies because in the end these two companies share many similarities of success and innovation. Both companies are based on the foundation of idealism, have CEO's that strive to accomplish such ideas, and work with an A-team of intelligent employees.