CASE Google: who drives the strategy? EXAMPLE Phyl Johnson From an idea to a verb in less than 15 years: 'to Google shareholders and the increased managerial freedom it to search the Internet. ' offered to them to run their company their way. Page and Brin also recruited successful CEO Eric If you want the answer to a question what do you do? You Schmidt from Novell Inc. and, between the three of Google it. It is one of the few companies whose product's them, shared power at the top. Schmidt dealt with name has become so synonymous with its offering that administration and Google's investors and had the most it has become a commonly used verb. By 2012 Google traditional CEO role. Page was centrally concerned with had a market capitalisation of $249.19 bn (C149.51 bn; the social structure of Google while Brin took a lead (186.89 bn). With a network of over 1 million computers in the area of ethics. worldwide, it was the dominant player in internet search 166 per cent of searches were through Google, way ahead of Microsoft's 'Bing' (15 per cent) and former How it was giant Yahoo (14 per cent)). The vast majority of Google's It could be difficult to work out who was responsible for revenue came from search-related advertising. It was, what inside Googleplex (Google's HQ) in Mountain View. however, under serious threat on several fronts. Well- California. There was a famously unstructured style publicised poor financial results in 2012 loft some of operating; in 2009 Eric Schmidt claimed that their commentators asking if Google was reaching the limits strategy was based on trial and error: of its growth.' And there were those who questioned if its idiosyncratic management style could continue given its "Google is unusual because it's really organised from size and increasingly diversified portfolio. The bottom up . . . It often feels at Google people are pretty much doing what they think best and they tolerate having us around . . . We don't really have About Google a five year plan . . . We really focus on what's new, Google started life as the brainchild of larry Page and what's exciting and how can you win quickly with your Sergey Brin when they were students at Stanford new idea." University in the USA. When Page and Brin launched With regard to product development, their approach was their own search engine product, it gained followers and to launch a part-finished (beta) product, let Google users quickly, attracted financial backing and enabled fanatics find it, toy with it, error-check and debug it - them to launch their IPO to the US stock market in an imaginative use of end users but also a significant 2004 raising a whopping $1.67 bn. release of control. Control of workflow, quality and to a From the beginning Google was different. Instead of large extent the nature of projects underway at any one using investment banks as dictators of the initial share time were down to employees and not management. price for the IPO, they launched a kind of open IPO Google was a famously light-managed organisation. It auction with buyers deciding on the fair price for a share. had a 1:20 ratio of employees to managers - half the Page sent an open letter to shareholders explaining that number of managers than in the average American Google was not a conventional company and did not organisation (1:10) and considerably fewer than some intend to become one; it was about breaking the mould. European countries (France 1:7.5). This continued as Google set up a two-tier board of CFO Patrick Pichette tells of being in a meeting room directors, a model which, though common in some with an influential businessman and being kicked out European countries (e.g. the Netherlands), is rare in by a group of young engineers who wanted the room the USA. The advantage for Page and Brin was the for their meeting. For him the lesson was that at Google additional distance it placed between them and their the leadership is 'an overhead' whereas the engineers