What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [62]
When he started craigslist as an email list, Newmark will tell you he had no idea what it would turn into. He didn’t know the impact it would have on classifieds and news. He didn’t know that people would find each other and go on dates and find restaurants for those dates and get married and have kids and buy baby furniture and get apartments and buy cars and improve their lives thanks to his simple lines of code. But they did. He didn’t know that when Hurricane Katrina struck, the New Orleans diaspora would use craigslist to find each other and jobs and homes. If he had tried to anticipate that, if he had over-researched and over-designed and set up all kinds of rules, restrictions, navigation, instructions, and fees for how to use craigslist, Katrina’s people wouldn’t have done what they did. And craigslist would be smaller than it is.
Instead Newmark created something useful that people used. He stood back and let them do it. He listened to them and added the features they wanted. He kept listening and solved problems with the technology and with the community’s use of it. And, by the way, his is about the ugliest but most useful design you can find this side of Google.
Google, too, tries to get out of the way. It creates platforms that people use—even enabling them to build businesses atop them—in ways that Google could not predict, could not design around, does not limit (well, not much), and generally does not charge for. Google realizes that its real value is not in limiting what people can do but in helping them do what only they can imagine. That is the essence of the Google worldview. That is what I will try to apply to a host of companies, industries, and institutions in the next section of this book. We end this section with the single best bit of advice you can glean from Google and from craigslist: Make something useful. Help people use it. And then…
Get out of the way.
If Google Ruled the World
“The search engine is going to control the planet,” declared author Paulo Coelho. But surely not everything, right? It’s not as if Google would want to run something dull like a utility (except that it is investing in the power industry) or a telephone company (well, it almost has) or enter the health industry (but it just did) or open a restaurant (then again, its cafeteria is world-famous and so is its chef, who wrote the book Food 2.0). Some people wish Google would take over a newspaper—The New York Times is often nominated—or entertainment companies or perhaps the software giant Microsoft. But no, Google knows what it is. Its ambition is not to take over the world, but to organize it.
So now that we have distilled Google’s success into a series of laws and lessons, we will attempt to apply them to a number of industries and institutions. I won’t pretend that I can fix a company in just a few pages. If only it were that easy…. Nor will I claim that I have found all the secrets to Google’s success. If only I could….
The point, instead, is to see things differently, to understand the fundamental changes of the Google age, to ask hard questions, to grasp new opportunities, to rethink, reimagine, and reinvent. That is the example to follow from Google. So the specifics of these cases are less important than the discipline, the attitude, the imagination, and the courage it takes to lead in this era of magnificent upheaval. Even if you don’t work in, say, the ad industry, I hope that in the discussion of how to remake advertising, you will find ideas and inspiration for your own situation. These industries and institutions provide a wide variety of examples of how to live by Google’s rules. Not all the rules will apply to your particular circumstances. But thinking and seeing in new ways is an imperative for everyone.