I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [68]
It was so blindingly obvious (to me) that I was right, yet I was so clearly wrong. Google did that to you—made you challenge all your assumptions and experience-based beliefs until you began to wonder if up was really up, or if it might not actually be a different kind of down.
Why Wrong Was Right
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 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.
Larry wouldn't enunciate this brief set of principles until 2004. Even if I'd had them on day one, it would have taken a while to reprogram my operating system to accept them. I happened to be really good at saying no.
All my previous jobs had inculcated in me the conviction that bad ideas, like termites, must be exterminated before they could gnaw away at our core business. If a proposal didn't arrive chained to a rock-solid guarantee of success reinforced with a five-year projection, breakeven points, and upward-trending arrows, it was a bad idea.
At the Merc I learned that the presumptive answer was always no, as in "If no one in authority tells you to do it, don't." At Google that answer was supposed to be yes. You should take initiative, though it was never clear how far you could go on your own.
Larry and Sergey had never worked in a company where they were taught otherwise—say a company that had been recording past events on the pulped remains of dead trees for a century and a half. So I needed to stop saying "Here's my concern," and start saying "Here's what you need to do to make that happen."
Sergey gave me an opportunity when he dynamited the dam of my resistance and homepage logos came pouring through. If I couldn't stop them, at least I could divert them from sweeping away the brand equity we had already built.
Karen White was the webmaster, and the webmaster had responsibility for the homepage. The webmaster also constituted one-half of the online brand group reporting to me. Karen would decorate the logos when we didn't have outside help.
About the time Ian Marsden's first Doodle ran, Karen hired an intern to help with updating the website. The intern, Dennis Hwang, was majoring in art and computer science and had helped with graphics for the gator-gone-wild horror flick Lake Placid ("You'll never know what bit you"). During his interview Dennis mentioned that on his last job he had volunteered to work thirty-hour weekend shifts without pay. That got our attention. And he could draw. Over the next year, we gave Dennis responsibility for decorating the logo and we stopped using contractors. Why pay for milk when you own a cow?
"Hey, tomorrow is election day! What are we doing for a logo?" a curious engineer would ask Karen or Dennis or me over dinner.
"Oh, something really cool. You'll see," we would answer. Then we would go back to our cubes and discuss whether we actually were going to do a logo for election day. For the first couple of years, that was the carefully structured process by which we instigated homepage alterations. If we decided to go ahead, Dennis would get to work, churning out one idea after another. Dennis never slept. In the still of the night, his stylus danced over the drawing pad connected to his computer, and by the time the morning dawned, a new logo was ready to adorn the site. One of the few decorations we