I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [1]
I smiled inwardly. It was a well-framed corporate kiss-up. I'd humbled myself and given Larry an opportunity to analyze my strengths as a member of Google's management team and to reward me with comforting words and reassurances about the value I added. Now he would recount those occasions when my counsel had been sage and congratulate me on my perspicacity. I envisioned us engaging in the non-physical equivalent of a man hug before I trundled off to savor the moment with a freshly made cappuccino in the micro-kitchen. That's how you "manage up" in a large corporation.
Larry looked at me with the same stare he had directed at the code on his screen, as if he were trying to decipher some undigested bit of an equation that refused to resolve itself.
"More often than not?" he asked me. "When were we ever wrong?"
He didn't smile as he asked his question or arch an eyebrow to signify annoyance. He simply wanted to know when he had been wrong so he could feed that information into the algorithm that ran his model of the universe. If he had made a mistake, he needed to know the specifics so he could factor that into the next iteration of the problem if it reappeared.
"Oh. That's right," I thought, awakening from my reverie. "I don't work at a large corporation anymore. I work at Google."
Operating Principles
You know Google.
At least, you know what Google does. It finds stuff on the Internet. That's as much as I knew when I joined the company in 1999. I didn't know what a web indexer, a pageranker, or a spidering robot was. I didn't know how dogmatic engineers could be. I didn't know how many Internet executives could squeeze into a hot tub or how it felt to "earn" more in one day than I had in thirty years of hard work. I didn't know then, but I do now.
True, my story is one of rare opportunity and fortuitous timing, but not entirely so.
This book tells how it felt to be subjected to the g-force of a corporate ascent without precedent, to find myself in an environment where old rules didn't apply and where relying on what I knew to be true almost got me fired. It's not a complete history of everything Google did between 1999 and 2005, nor a completely objective retelling of Google's greatest hits. I wrote the official history of Google during that period and inscribed it on the company's website.* Most accounts since have merely embellished it, and I don't intend to cover all that old ground again. Instead I'll give my insider's view of how things worked (and didn't work) and how we changed as individuals and as a corporate entity.
This book won't delve deeply into Google's current imbroglios over censorship, regulation, and monopoly. I include only what happened between my first day in 1999 and the day I left in 2005. We weren't yet worried about network neutrality, street-view data gathering, or offshore wind farms. Our big issues barely grazed the electrified moral fence of our "Don't be evil" credo: develop the best search technology, sell lots of ads, avoid getting killed by Microsoft.
While this story is told from a marketer's perspective and my title came to encompass "consumer brand management," this book is not just about marketing. I don't claim to have "built" Google's brand. The brand was built on the product, and the product was built by engineers—computer scientists who constructed systems as complex as any that ever launched a rocket into space, but powering instead a small rectangular search box that now appears in every corner of the Internet.
I'll describe the work habits that enabled them to accomplish a great deal in a short time and the shortcomings that developed in a company where every problem was viewed as solvable and every situation as reducible to a set of data points; where knowing you were right meant nothing should, could, or would stand in your way.
And I'll show how a company with a vision of providing access to all the world's information