What I learned from Google

During my sojourn in Israel this summer the PICZ crew took a little trip to northern Israel. We paid a visit to the industrial park Tefen and then headed to the Haifa office of Google. After our group marveled at the astro-turfed roof deck and ransacked the fully-stocked ice-cream freezer and soda machine, we had the pleasure of meeting Joelle, one of the chief technical officers of Google Haifa. She was a jovial woman who prided herself on being a geek and was pleasantly surprised when members of our group threw out some nerdy questions.

The claim to fame of Google’s Haifa office is the creation of the predictive word completion that occurs in Google search fields. As impressive as that is, I was more intrigued by the macro principles that nurtured this type of innovation. As Joelle zipped through her Powerpoint she lingered long enough on the slide describing Google’s management philosophy so that I was able to whip out my notebook and jot down the following:

The Google Model

• Hire bright people and give them lots of freedom.
• Work on things that matter.
• Small teams do wonders.
• Minimize bureaucracy.
• Let people work on exciting problems that will affect everyone in the world.
• Don’t be afraid to try new things.
• Solve problems with algorithms (if at all possible).
• Twenty percent of your work time should be fun or play.

Google swag
I also wrote down, “laughing brings creativity and innovation…” because it seemed like a sensible soundbite to write down.

I couldn’t help but wonder what life would be like if our work environment mimicked even half of the Google model.
How cool would that be! Well, at least I got a cool pen.