The Google Way
Vortex 2005 got off to a great start Tuesday with presentations from author and IT guru Geoffrey Moore, Intel strategist Chris Thomas, Notes-meister Ray Ozzie and HP honcho Ann Livermore.
But the highlight of the day was provided by Douglas C. Merrill, senior director of IT at Google. Working with a clean slate, Google created a culture of innovation based on principles of ``living out loud,'' ``using data, not intuition'' and ``automating the work.''
What does that mean to employees inside Google? The organization is flat, people are rotated around constantly, engineers are encouraged to spend 20% of their time working on whatever they find interesting, employees are evaluated by everybody who has something to say about that person, and the evaluations are public.
At the end of each week, everyone is emailed and asked to identify projects they're working on and anyone in the company can ask to be kept updated on a specific proejct or a certain type of project. According to Merrill, this helps Google drive innovation. Hey, it seems to be working.
Back to Vortex Blog
Comments
Post a comment
