Google Reboot

Article in Business Week about Google's attempt to cut through its own peanut butter:

"The weekly meeting, known as Execute, was launched last summer with a specific mission: to get the near-sovereign leaders of Google's far-flung product groups into a single room and harmonize their disparate initiatives. Google co-founder Sergey Brin runs the meeting, along with new Chief Executive Officer Larry Page and soon-to-be-former CEO Eric Schmidt. The unstated goal is to save the search giant from the ossification that can paralyze large corporations. It won't be easy, because Google is a tech conglomerate, an assemblage of parts that sometimes work at cross-purposes. Among the most important barons at the meeting: Andy Rubin, who oversees the Android operating system for mobile phones; Salar Kamangar, who runs the video-sharing site YouTube; and Vic Gundotra, who heads up Google's secret project to combat the social network Facebook. "We needed to get these different product leaders together to find time to talk through all the integration points," says Page during a telephone interview with Bloomberg Businessweek minutes before a late-January Execute session. "Every time we increase the size of the company, we need to keep things going to make sure we keep our speed, pace, and passion."

If I go back to what we wrote about Yahoo's attempt to reduce the Peanut Butter in early 2008

History teaches that companies can and do come back from the brown stuff - in fact there is a strong element of cyclicality in many companies and industries. However, the "coming back from the brink" usually requires some fairly major housekeeping - some throwing out of baggage, bathwater and a few babies as well.

But it is a sad fact that the people who get companies into these states of affairs are too often the ones with the reins in hand when it comes to sorting it out, and if there is one lesson to take about companies in trouble its that senior management will fire legions of innocents before the market finally fires them in turn.

There are 3 factors weighing against this reboot:

(i) Big companies ARE big and complex - you can break it up and make all the units autonomous but they will then replicate lots of functions, not co-ordinate and even act against each other units. Keep it all together and you get a slow behemoth. Key is to differentiate complementary businesses from ones that are islands and diversions. Some of the stuff Google does is not really search (Mobile OS Software, AI Cars), and there must be an argument that those can be done in pretty independent units.

(ii) Not saying that Larry Page himself is part of the problem, but I suspect (based purely on observation of many large corporates) - in diametric disagreement with the Business Week article, that some of the old hands may be, especially if there are stovepipes runby very powerful barons..

(iii) However,the other thing I have heard from more than one friend at Google is that it has slowly filled up with corporate weasels (the people who are great at managing up, poor at leading teams, very political, and often useless - but these people can create havoc and waste a lot of other people's time). All companies have this of course, but it sounds like Google has a bad infestation right now.

And all this is in the light of "Never mind the requirements put on a a public company". Apple and IBM are the 2 companies in this space that have successfully followed a few separate "S" curves, but in both cases they had to firstly hit the buffers (the only way you typically get freedom to make the changes necessary to succeed) and secondly had to bring in new ideas and people from outside.

So what to do? On Sunday I put forward some thoughts - Fundamentals, Focus and Futures - the chances of a second home run like search is unlikely, but Search is one hell of a home run and cultivating it could drive a company for a generation.