Reference no: EM133091817

How Google's Founders Created a Groovy Culture

Google, whose fast-growing product line includes a continuously improving search engine, web browser, e-mail, and chat has a mission, "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." The company was started in 1995 when two computer science Stanford's graduates, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, collaborated to develop a new kind of search engine technology. They understood the shortcomings of existing search engines and by 1998, they had developed a superior search engine they felt was ready to go online. They raised $1 million from family, friends, and risk-taking "angel" investors to buy the hardware necessary to connect Google's software to the Internet.

At first, Google answered only 10,000 inquires a day-its plain home page is hardly welcoming but within a few months, it was answering 500,000 inquires; by the end of 1999, 3 million inquires; and by the spring of 2001, it reached 100 million inquiries per day! In 2010, Google is the most widely used global search engine, it has over a 65 percent market share, and it is one of the top five most-used Internet websites. Google's rise has been so rapid that rivals like Yahoo! and Microsoft are struggling to compete and prevent Google from providing all the other services they offer-and doing it better and for free (Google makes billions of dollars of revenues by selling the advertising space used on all kinds of websites).

Google's explosive growth is largely due to the culture of entrepreneurship and innovation its founders cultivated from the start. Although by 2010, Google has grown to over 20,000 employees worldwide, its founders claim that it still maintains a small company feels because its culture empowers employees, who it calls staffers or "Googlers," to create the best software possible. Brin and Page created Google's entrepreneurial culture in several ways.

From the start, lacking office space and desperate to keep costs low, Google staffers worked in "high-density clusters," that encouraged intensive team interactions. Three or four staffers, each equipped with a powerful server PC, worked at a common desk or on couches or rubber ball chairs to improve its technology. Even when Google moved into more spacious surroundings at its modernistic "Googleplex" headquarters building in Mountain View, California, staffers continued to work in shared spaces, so its team atmosphere or culture became normal.

Google also designed its building so staffers could continually meet each other; in places such as Google's funky lobby, the Google Café where everyone eats together, in its state-of-the-art recreational facilities, and in its "snack rooms equipped with bins packed with cereals, gummi bears, yogurt, carrots, and make-your-own cappuccinos. They also created opportunities for employees to gather together at informal events such as a TGIF open meeting and a twice-weekly outdoor roller-hockey game.

All this attention to creating what just might be the "grooviest" company headquarters in the world did not come about by chance. Brin and Page knew that Google's most important strength would be its ability to attract the best software engineers in the world and motivate them to perform well. Common offices, lobbies, cafes, and so on bring all staffers into close contact with each other, which develops collegiality, encourages them to share their new ideas and to continually work to improve Google's online applications, and develop new products to grow the company.

The freedom Google gives its staffers to pursue new ideas is a clear signal of its founders' desire to empower them to be innovative and work hard to make Google the software powerhouse of the future. But to motivate staffers to innovate important new software applications Google's founders reward their achievements by giving them stock in the company, which makes staffers owners as well, and over a thousand Google staffers have already become millionaires as a result.

Source: George, J. M., & Jones, G. R. (2012). Understanding and Managing Organizational Behavior (6 th ed.). Pearson Education.

1. Based on the concepts of communication, determine whether Google is effectively communicating with its staffers. Provide justifications to your answers.

2. Discuss Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs Theory and explain how Google satisfied its staffers' needs in the given case. Indicate precisely how each need is being satisfied.

3. Apart from satisfying staffers' needs, discuss ONE contemporary theory of motivation and suggest how Google can motivate its staffers further. Provide detailed discussion and suggestions.

4. Discuss Hersey and Blanchard's Situational Leadership Theory and explain how managers at Google can lead their staffers effectively by using this theory.

5. The founders of Google are very clear on what businesses they are in and what they want to do with those businesses. Explain TWO growth strategies that Google might adopt to be the market leader in the search engine and continue to become the software powerhouse of the future.

6. With consideration of Google's workplace culture and business nature, recommend THREE types of training methods that might be useful to provide training of new technology to its staffers. Provide rationale for your recommendation.