Google Inches toward Becoming a Management Touchstone
October 1, 2008
If you have tried to call Google, you probably wonder how the company can continue to thrive. Googley does not often translate into management sophistication. At a recent conference, the Google staff abandoned its exhibit booth, leaving those wanting information looking at the vacant space.
Imagine my surprise when I read this MSNBC story on September 30, 2008. Aaron Ricadela’s “Intuit Taps Hewlett Packard and Google for Advice”. The new CEO (Brad Smith) at Intuit sought out executives from a number of companies, including Google and Facebook. The result of these conversations, according to Mr. Ricadela was that Intuit will allow its engineers to use 10 percent of their work time for skunk work and personal projects. Facebook’s CEO, the Googley Sheryl Sandberg, offered some tips on forming communities around the Intuit accounting program.
Good for Mr. Smith. Intuit survived several go rounds with Microsoft. By seeking ideas from such companies as Google and Facebook, he is tapping into a non-traditional brand of management theory. Business schools are rushing to keep pace with the Google approach to business. Its features include going slow, showing pundits lava lamps and quirky whiteboard messages, and relying on permanent beta tests instead of products that launch and fail.
Will the Googley approach to management work? Maybe. If Mr. Smith learned about management from Google, I hope he learned that Google could without much effort launch a cloud based version of Intuit’s products tomorrow, maybe in two days. Microsoft battled Intuit in terms of a buy out, a local software installation, and with after-thought online functionality. Google, on the other hand, is all cloud, all the time.
How will this play out? Google has made no overt moves to create an online competitor to Microsoft Money or Intuit’s flag ship accounting service. We will have to wait and see if Google rolls out a beta. That will be quite a management tip for Mr. Smith if it happens.
Stephen Arnold, October 1, 2008
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