What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [52]
Start by letting your customers into the genesis of your products: your design process. Impossible, you protest: It’s a secret. Well, why is that? By closing off design, you’re also closing yourself off from the best ideas of the people who need, buy, and care about your product. Think how much more valuable your products and company would be if you were to give your customers exactly what they want. Take one project or product and try being radically transparent about it (as we will explore in the chapter, “Manufacturing”). Blog about your plans and decisions. Join in conversations—human conversations—with customers. Ask people what you should do. Admit mistakes. Open up.
Your competitive advantage is not that your designs are secret but that you have a strong relationship with your community of customers. I’m not suggesting that you hand over design to a committee of the whole. That would be like turning over the boardroom to a giant focus group. Design cannot come out of town-hall meetings. It’s still your job to come up with good ideas, to invent, inspire, surprise—and to execute well. Companies are not democracies. But neither should they be dictatorships. They should be—but too rarely are—meritocracies. Your challenge is to get good ideas to surface and survive from within and without and to enable customers and employees to improve your ideas and products.
Don’t be evil
We can’t leave a chapter about ethics and Google without addressing its famous self-admonition: “Don’t be evil.” Larry Page and Sergey Brin interpreted the pledge this way in a letter they wrote before their 2004 initial public offering: “We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served—as shareholders and in all other ways—by a company that does good things for the world even if we forego some short-term gains. This is an important aspect of our culture and is broadly shared within the company.”
They defined good behavior as delivering unbiased search results and not accepting payment for advantage in listings. They vowed to clearly label advertising, comparing their policy with newspapers’ rules. They set themselves apart from marketers, saying: “We believe it is important for everyone to have access to the best information and research, not only to the information people pay for you to see.”
One could see their covenant on evil either as the height of hubris—Google declaring itself the headquarters of corporate virtue—or as a case of saying what should be assumed. It necessarily raises questions about whether Google is living up to its credo. Google has censored search results in China, arguing that it is better to bring a hampered internet there than no internet at all. I don’t agree and believe that Google has more power than it knows to pressure countries around the world to respect openness and free speech. Google, like Yahoo, has handed over information to governments—Google in India, Yahoo in China—that led to users being arrested simply for what they said. As an American and a First Amendment absolutist, I’d call that evil. I think that Google’s lack of transparency about advertising splits is not evil but is also not virtuous business. Some would argue that Google is the bad guy for making money off news headlines while news organizations are struggling; I disagree and say that Google is doing news sites the favor of sharing audience. Some would say that Google can do evil with the private information it has about our searches, clicks, and even health history; I don’t think we’ve seen evidence of misuse yet.
Is Google a monopoly? In 2008, as the U.S. Justice Department began an antitrust inquiry into Google’s deal to sell ads for Yahoo, New York Times columnist Joe Nocera reported that Sourcetool.com had filed a complaint