BUSINESS STRATEGY AS HUMAN STORY: A Deep B. presentation

Something Completely New: why Google attracts everyone the way it does

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Is this how Google's competitors mock them at their own peril? Clockwise from the top left: Steve Jobs of Apple, Bill Gates, founding chairman of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer CEO,Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google(together),fictional photo montage cour

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....or do Larry and Sergey prefer to see themselves like this: not as usurpers but as macho revolutionaries?

Lava lamps, electric scooters and the mensa Lava lamps, electric scooters and the mensa boys

There was a time when a boy with a business sense and plenty of ambition used to watch trapeze artists flying from one rope to another in a Russian circus act. Another boy in another part of the world used to play with lego bricks and wonder when the world would come together a bit like those lego pieces ,mismatched but still...in the

end,coming together. Why business could not be chaotic? Why business had to be ,well,businesslike. Why here was not a single way,on this planet of many colours of mismatched lego bricks ,for business to grow in a way in that didn't pander to corruption and plain evil and silencing of human ideas like ....like expressing oneself . And so it happened that in the fourth decade after the fourth century after Gutenberg's invention of the printing press, the Russian-origin boy,Sergey, and the American boy,Larry, joined together in a garage in America to start making the worldbrain which was playful and was not evil and Google was born (of course they called it a search engine although its soul would later be called and run by something called an Android-which was literally a world mind because anyone could add to it ).The rest is the first fairy tale in the history of the human

species that didn't have a villain - no gremlins, no wolves, no evil witch- but such business sense that just twelve years later when the two boys walked out of China (figuratively speaking )there was such an earthquake it made two of the giants of this world start quarelling with each other ,while the two boys and their millions of friends laughed all the way to the bank even as they struck the greatest blow for freedom any business corporation had ever done.

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The writer of this presentation, Deep B.,did not only want to make a point about business strategy.He teaches English at a

prestigious institute,Elite Academy, in India, and is available for consultations regarding any topics related to English ,a subject which he has spent 14 years educating students,at the following number: +355669177028 Do not hesitate to dial this number to chat with Deep B.,if you need guidance in a friendly and understanding manner regarding your English and humanities.

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At a conference at Google headquarters, Google CEO Eric Schimdt,Page and Brin

the kind of electric scooters which Google employees use to commute inside the Googleplex

When power came calling: Barack Obama, then a presidential candidate, and later to have several Google employees at his White House, at the Google H.Q.in 2008

The spectacular 180 degree earth-dome projected at Google H.Q.

The day after the rain:w hy great business The day after the rain:why great businesses are often founded by chaotic misfits

This is the human story of Google .This is also the story of why a chaotic,that is ,disorderly, human condition is the key to success in business. The best strategy in this world is to have no strategy.Has it ever struck you that most of the great companies of the second half of the 20th century were founded by people who didn't have too much strategy ,just plain break and build -like those lego blocks in little Larry's hands ,or the trapeze artists in Sergey's

nightly dreams ,holding each other's hands just for a second ,letting go, then forming a new chain. Witness Bill Gates founding Microsoft after being kicked out of college in the 70s ,sleeping under a desk in his office night after night ;Steve Jobs throwing out every single design being presented to him and sending his men back to the drawing board again and again; Mark Zuckerberg going into a fit of highly electric swooning right after his girlfriend leaves him and founding Facebook then and there, Alan Mullaly reviving Ford after drastically opening the door to self -criticism ;Kiichiro Toyoda founding an auto-company where every employee is given the power to pull a chain to stop the entire assembly line , and which has to recall six million cars in 2010 just as it had to do for millions back in the 1950s ,and yet keeps growing at an amazing pace each and every time instead of its sales

slumping ;and then Larry Page,the teenager who roamed about in a room full of technical journals strewn across the floor co-founding Google( whose name itself derives from a mispronunciation of the term 'goo-gol' or one followed by a hundred zeroes ). Here's Page in 2006, well after Google went Public: "We don't generally talk about strategy ......because it's

THIS HUMAN STORY OF GOOGLE IS A PRESENTATION FROM DEEP B., A TEACHER WITH 14 YEARS EXPERIENCE IN HANDLING ESSAY WRITING, ENGLISH GRAMMAR, AND LITERATURE. IN NEED OF SOMEONE TO TALK TO REGARDING THAT REPORT YOU ARE WRITING BUT CAN'T GET THE HANG OF WHICH EXACT WORDS TO USE, OR MAYBE IT'S END OF TERM ESSAY OR COMPOSITION ASSIGNMENT THAT'S

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strategic. I would rather have people think we're confused than let our competitors know what we're going to do". In other words the strategy is to have no strategy. Why does Google do this? A few years back, a Google vice-president was deeply frustrated. The 37 year old,Sheryl Sandberg, charged with overseeing Google's entire network of automated advertising approached the desk of Larry Page in a deeply apologetic mood,"God, I feel really bad about this",and apologised for a decision in which she had wasted what she called "some money" .Larry's reaction was ,"I am so glad you made this mistake. Because I want to run a company where we are moving too quickly and doing too much ,not

being too cautious and doing too little. If we don't have any of these mistakes, we're just not taking enough risk." In her 1998 book, Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos, Shona Brown wrote that the fulcrum to all this (messing around the place, wearing propeller shaped hats ,doodling semi-rubbish about a moon base at Google H.Q.,no less, devising faulty revenue making strategies then making connections from those) is nothing but to step out of one's own comfort zones . As she lays down ,

1.GET UNCOMFY: That means never settle into an equilibrium (a.k.a. "rut"), but don't fall apart either (a.k.a. the chaos trap)

2. PACE YOURSELF: This basically means listening to your own internal rhythms ,about when a particular business strategy might be starting to pay

dividends,and when it is not.No multitasking ,please. Perhaps you can see here the philosophy behind the gyms and the swimming pools and the gourmet meals at Google headquarters and other things such as bringing the dog along and playing a game of tennis right in the middle of the office .

3. HANG LOOSE: That is, don't allow too much structure in the company, which also means 'the bureaucratic trap'. General Motors discovered this the hard way when they ended up making a commitee for everything,and had elaborate meetings for approving every simple decision before they realised that the company was going bust.

4. PLAY NICE: This is not the same thing as 'Don't be evil'(something to which I will come later). According to Brown, this means poor collaboration within the

organization ,like when all your systems are not working together because the company's big moneymaker,as she says, doesn't share know-how or ideas with everyone else.

Shortly after she wrote the book ,Shona Brown was appointed Google's vice-president for business operations . The father of modern computing ,Alan Turing ,once said that a machine or a system could be said to have become truly intelligent only when it developed the capability to tell lies. Google, obviously , believes in approaching an entire business operation or a system it develops from the backside ,that is, by being able to detect when it has started telling these 'lies': glitches in the system or a faulty design ,something like the 'kaizen' approach adopted by another great company, the auto-giant Toyota, in its day-to-day manufacturing process. Google's entire

contribution to the human condition lies precisely here ,the point where you become nothing and then expand to become something, where you make mistake after mistake and only after doing that arrive at the correct thought processes and make the 'correct choices'. Are there really such things as 'correct choices'? Not only does human psychology but its implications and the ways in which it affects human decisions in science and politics proves this (heard of someone called Thomas Alva Edison?) time and again,that there is no correct decision except the one which we make after making a lot of decisions which are not to our complete satisfaction,sometimes completely off the mark.

Why does someone like President Barack Obama,a self confessed sceptic about big industries and corporations, populate his cabinet and his White House offices with

Google employees? The answer to that might lie in nothing but the way Google's and its employees' thinking process matches the whole coming together of the different strands in the thinking and the needs of the human mind throughout history and business, and its finest fruit, the liberal democratic system, which (mind you) is desired by both those who live in democratic nations and those who don't. "Few thinkers prior to the advent of the American liberal-democratic experiment thought democracy could work in any but the most limited forms .....(that)the common people are too stupid and ignorant to be trusted electing their own leaders ..(and yet)liberal democracy did succeed and is today the stated preference of the majority of the world's peoples...",writes Timothy Ferris in his book The Science of Liberty(Harper Collins,2010,as quoted in Scientific

American ,September 2010). He further goes on to state, "Liberalism and science are methods,not ideologies. Both incorporate feedback loops through which actions ..can be evaluated to see whether they continue to meet the general approval." Yes, Google might be serving sub-standard fare to its affiliates in its offices as far as Hyderabad,India and not treating them at par with its employees ,it might be facing opposition in villages in England where its cameras intrude too much (so the inhabitants say) into the privacy of the people, but the fact remains that Google, as a giant corporation, with its feedback loops which are similar to what Harris describes ,is the closest we have come so far to having a human-manufactured version of the mind of god : a sobering thought , and the reason it is facing litigation from various quarters ,including from one of the

president's own offices. All the same ,it being a search engine ,is the closest we are also likely to come to a human mind of massive proportions ,the reason why it was embroiled in such a controversy with the Chinese government when the feedback loops of its servers in Hong Kong tried to route some censored matter to the mainland. Its the reason Google has been designated by no less a renowned magazine than The Economist as the greatest invention since Gutenberg's printing press and its co-founder Sergey Brin 'a man of the Enlightenment '( I discovered this after I myself made this comparison at the beginning of this present article).

Doing too much,taking too much risk? Doing too much,taking too much risk?

 Is Google actually over reaching itself ? Just before I started this article, I got a tiny

reminder of this . I was going through some of the Twitter feeds from Google employees and one from Hyderabad, India, caught my attention. The guy was a affiliate employee of Google there: a contract worker. He complains that he and  other affiliates like him are being given much worse food than the other employees at Google's main headquarters at Hyderabad, that they are not allowed to participate in the meetings held at headquarters.There is its Google Earth project,of course,for which Google has launched a special satellite of its own in 2008 and sends special vans with dozens of cameras loaded on the roof into every nook and cranny of Europe, not to mention the litigations pending against it as it pushes more and more ahead in its quest to digitize each and every single book in the world into one huge library. In social networking ,its site Orkut has been a failure and it draws

frequent criticism for its huge database drawn from all its affiliate websites regarding any person in this world using any of its services. Google counters that its policy of "Do no evil" , its refusal to hand over people's Internet data to prosecutors for use in courts, its refusal to create its own content : all this should put to rest any suspicions about its intentions. However ,consider what happened in 2005. A reporter from tech-news website CNET that year deliberately googled CEO Eric Scmidt in order to find out how much data she could expose about him .She succeeded in uncovering his net worth ,street address,and the names of all those he had invited to a political fund-raiser. This incident led to a lot of heart-burn at Google, where at first it was  proposed boycotting CNET for a year( although that was not done) but the point had already been made.

Then consider its list of 100 top priorities, a list which only Page, Brin, and Schimdt have full access to (being the creators)and which are difficult to keep track of,given their very nature,if you just look at some of them which are known. In 2006, for example, samples from the list ran like this( and these were speculations,remember,only on some of which Larry and Sergey have commented)- 1.New ways to search for(and perhaps buy)music; 2.an online payment service to rival PayPal;  3.some sort of smartphone ; 4.a space elevator to transport things to the moon etc. Brin and Page are actually said to take  the idea of the space elevator seriously and have even raised $4.2 billion in 2005 to fund ideas such as those, though in the last few years, it is only the smartphone in that list that has seen the light of day. Is this just pretense,or part of a greater plan for world

domination? Or is it the kind of curtain drawn across the faces of people like earnings-guidance analysts ( who are not invited to Google's annual sessions for investors) which led to incidents like the sharp drop in Google's share value in February 2006 because of earnings,which, according to TIME magazine then,"Wall Street didn't like". CEO Eric Schimdt countered that this was the way Google functioned, that the space elevators and the goofy games at headquarters were what made up Google's strategy: "With the lava lamps and scooters,everybody thought we were idiots ,the last vestiges of the dotcoms. It worked until it leaked out how well we were doing( TIME,February 20,2006)."  Until it leaked. Those are the operative words. Perhaps Google would do well to paraphrase its motto slightly to "Let no evil happen."

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There I got it! the full image of where it all happens: Google headquarters at Mountain View,California

The breaking dow n of w alled gardens The breaking down of walled gardens

What comes across after going carefully through the Google story is that human civilization is fast approaching a horizon, if you like, in terms of how much data we wish to throw into the universe, individually and collectively. Ultimately what makes Google special is the fact that its at the vanguard of the struggle to maintain a system based on an open sourced software ,namely, the

Android ,as opposed to the efforts of companies like AOL and Apple to develop what are called 'Walled Gardens'. These are actually pre-packaged software platforms which allow only the developers of specific applications to act as the 'gardeners' and not the regular users, thus limiting our choice of what data ,and how much data we get to handle on the Internet , and how much we can control that data so that it does not get used by software developers to create content on the web free of our consent, or conversely, to limit free speech and censor apps which they don't like or find plain 'incompatible' with their devices. This is where people can trust Google because of its support for outfits like the Data Liberation Front ,which helps users maintain control over their personal information . Its more than being able to search for something you want, its about ensuring that the giant

empire of information which the likes of Google has created stays at the control of the people for whom it is swimming out there in the Web. Ultimately its about freeing the information superhighway, the most significant invention since humankind discovered fire. That is why Google attracts us as something completely new...a road in the tangled matrix which we can follow without fear to the farthest corners of the known world. That's what the lava lamps and the scooters are there for.