Ken Auletta - Googled - The End of the World as We Know It

What isn’t so nice for Google executives is that they often don’t know where the founders are, or if they will attend meetings. Page and Brin resist being tied to someone else’s schedule. With no assistant to contact, the way executives learn if one or both founders will attend a meeting is if they see that Page or Brin has placed the meeting on his online Google Calendar, which senior Google executives share. Sometimes, Schmidt said, the founders show up unscheduled for the wrong meetings. Sometimes they disappear-Larry suddenly to tour a cafeteria to make sure it seats no more than one hundred and fifty, which he insists is the maximum size to inspire a team culture; Sergey or Larry to disappear from the office (if the wind has picked up) to pursue their kite-surfing hobby, which relies on a small surfboard and wind to propel the kite and skim across the water.

Schmidt defends management chaos, or at least a degree of it, as a style that fits the founders, and he offered an illustration. For months he tried to get the founders to craft a corporate strategy memo for the future, believing their “brilliance” produces unique insights. He couldn’t pin them down. Finally, on a business trip to Seville, he opened his e-mail and up popped a draft from Brin. “Perfect,” he thought, and shared it with Page, who was on the trip. Page made his edits, then Schmidt did some edits and circulated the draft to Google’s management with a “What’s missing?” note. “Why couldn’t I get them to write this in a normal way?” Schmidt asked. “That’s not the way their minds work. Their ideas are much better than mine. I can’t write the memo, and in that you see why they are the founders.”

Whatever their brilliance, each member of the troika running Google has the same liability, said an industry insider who knows them well. “None is an inspirational leader, a great salesman, or a great speaker.” Their brilliance and success move people, but not their words or the symbols they evoke. They are not Steve Jobs, not gifted salesmen or evangelical leaders.

Page and Brin differ from Jobs in another significant way. Al Gore, who has had a ringside seat at the management of both Apple and Google, said that he deeply admires the founders of each company, but “a genius like Steve comes along only once in several generations.” Jobs has demonstrated his genius over a longer period of time than Page and Brin, he believes, and also has benefited from something the Google founders lack: “Steve has the great if painful experience of failing, and coming back.” The wisdom that comes from failure has not yet punched Page and Brin.

It was time in the spring of 2008 for executives to make tough choices among the 150 products Google produced. Why 150 products? “That can be stated as criticism, but it can also be stated as strategy,” Schmidt responded. “The goal of the company is customer satisfaction. You should think of Google as one product”: customer satisfaction. This response summons memories of Yahoo’s famous Peanut Butter Manifesto. Composed in November 2006 as an internal memo by Yahoo senior vice president Brad Garlinghouse, it was leaked and caused a stir in the Valley. Garlinghouse wrote:

We lack a focused, cohesive vision for our company. We want to do everything and be everything-to everyone… I’ve heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular.

Search gives Google more of a focus than a self-proclaimed “media company” like Yahoo might have. Yet a departed Google executive, who like many who voice criticism of Google’s management chooses to do so anonymously, said, “Google could do fewer products and make less investments. They are doing too many products and peanut buttering everything.”

Why?

“They’ve never had to make hard choices,” answered the former executive. “The company is so successful that it can do anything. They think they can make energy. Why? They have passion. That’s what makes Google great. The question is when things get hard, can they make tough decisions?”

The CEO of an old media company described a visit he and his COO made to Google a few years ago. They were doing what Mel Karmazin had done: take a tour of Google and have a meal with the founders and Schmidt. As an executive led them around, they paused to look at the gallery of photographs of the projects Google had launched. The Google executive explained the 20 percent time each engineer was given. The COO asked, “Has there ever been a project started where someone said, ‘OK, it’s not what we thought it was. We should get rid of it.’?”

“I don’t think so,” answered their tour guide.

When I pressed a longtime Google executive to recall the products the company had canceled, he came up with just two: Google Answers and Google Catalog Search. “This is a company that doesn’t set priorities,” said another former Google executive. Part of the reason, this person said, traces to the founders. “It’s the Talmud of the founders. The word of God. And everyone interprets the word of God at Google.”

It’s very hard not to defer to founders who have been right so often. But here’s where Schmidt is criticized for not imposing his will. One reason, said a former Google executive, is because “He hates confrontation.” A second reason, said another former manager, is because “Eric runs the company-unless there’s someting Larry really cares about. Anything Larry cares about, he runs. Like products.” Brin is said to assert himself on fewer things, but on advertising and privacy policies, business deals, or “Google’s approach to China, Sergey rules.” The prominent CEO of one company that does business with Google said he found Schmidt “odd, as if he’s holding something back. In the guise of someone who is straight-a sincere, decent, thoughtful, kind man-he is something different than all of those qualities. In his business dealings people will tell you that if he said, ‘OK, I agree to this,’ you will find that he actually hasn’t done so. If you confront him, he said he couldn’t. Or he forgot. Or he gives you gobbledegook.”

Why? “He is not the decider,” the CEO answered. “Yet in certain areas he pretends that he is. Eric is smoothly duplicitous.”

Silicon Valley venture capitalist Roger McNamee of Elevation Partners calls “Google the most impressive company I’ve ever seen.” Yet in mid-2008 he also said, “I am very disappointed in Eric Schmidt. He got off to a great start because he was wise enough to leave a crazy culture alone. The Google culture has become a monster.”

Even Coach Campbell, who has no direct managerial responsibilities, is not immune from criticism. “He’s more a crutch than a coach,” said a former Google executive, who believes Campbell compliments too much and challenges too little. A senior Google executive observes that until late 2008, Google never had an internal budget that apportioned capital, made choices about what resources to allocate; instead, it projected expenditures and revenues month by month. He blames the CEO for this, but also asked of the experienced coach, “Where was Bill?” He said Campbell spends too much time dispensing hugs. “I find him all hat and no cattle.”

MARC ANDREESSEN was of two minds about Google. On the one hand, he believed, “Google is in a great position,” particularly with YouTube, which he thought will find a way to monetize. On the other hand, he cautioned against Google’s “trying to do everything. You saw their energy initiative! History suggests that people have circles of competence and when you go outside the circle, they fail.”