24 Nov Tasting the Google Culture

The Google Culture is a key aspect of the solid foundation under Google’s innovative activities. The Google culture is embedded in a mission statement, transparency, and voice.

“Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” The mission statement creates a focus, a direction, which is targeted by all innovative activities. Transparency means everybody can know everything that Google does. This ranges from rallying cries like Mobile first or AI first to innovative teams being open about their latest developments.

Voice implies on a small scale that employees are to socialise. Google facilitates this by hiring a chef to upgrade the coffeemachine to a restaurant-lounche room where everybody has breakfast, lunch, dinner and midnight snack. Here, employees meet, form teams, and start to work. I regret – taking pictures not allowed. On a larger scale Google top staff has weekly talks with all 70.000 employees. To overcome some practical problems of scale (meeting 70.00 people weekly brings some issues), Google has developed an up-voting system a bit like Reddit. If sufficient employees upvote a question, Sundar Pichai (Google CEO) will answer your question personally.

My first experience with the Google culture had me gain some weight – my first step towards the Google Stone.