Googles Chaos Management Style - Assignment Example

Google’s Chaos Management Style - A Case Study Contents Introduction 3 2.Google’s organizational structure and culture 4 3.Google’s Management Style 6 4.Google’s Motivational Approach as a Role Model 8 5.Collaborative Effort and Team Work within Google Employees 10 6.Conclusion and Recommendations 12 Reference List 15 1. Introduction Chaos management is not a new terminology in the stream of organizational change management. Right from its first reference in Tom Peters classical piece of chaos management (Peters and Rodabaugh, 1988) to the literatures till date, most of the organizers and managers have conventionally considered chaos management as essential to performance improvement and cost reduction. Detailed literature analysis (Fitzgerald and Frans, 2002) on chaos and organizational change management has elucidated three major attributes; namely, chaos is a metapraxis, a complex process that is neither a process or a model but inherent in organizational reality; secondly, the theory of self-interest or self-perpetuation is in tandem with the principles of chaos, especially an ethic of connectivity (Irvin, 2002) and thirdly, the specific principles of chaos in the form of ‘connectivity, consciousness, and interdeterminacy’(Fitzgerald, 2002) provide practical approaches to “network multilogue”, a socially interactive corporate environment with amenities of personal growth (Hoogerwerf and Poorthuis,2002) An interesting observation in most of the literatures on organizational management has been that the factor of chaos is unavoidable and always there to stay in business, especially in this racy times of extreme internet invasion affecting our lives. The present study on Google Company aspires to unveil the peculiarities of an organization, in the light of brink of chaos. This essay wishes to stress upon the academic constructs, supported by secondary anecdotal evidence of each of the elements of structure and composition of the workforce, vibrancy within the office premise, dedication and motivation among employees to deliver more, dynamism among management and a focus on a group-based approach to the value chain of internet business. The contemporary literatures have indicated the relevance of innovation, a new form of management, wherein chaos is a tool for maximizing profit and establishing brand image in the industry. By the end of this discussion, these elements and a critical analysis of each, using Google Company as an example would be clearly explained. 2. Google’s organizational structure and culture The organizational culture at Google is simplified, yet interesting. With a smart and determined task force, Google Company encompasses people from all walks of life, who speak a dozen of languages and reflect the global audience that they always serve. The idea is to maintain an open culture wherein everyone can feel comfortable sharing ideas and opinions. Thus, while maintaining a serious commitment to work, Google ensures that its employees have enough food for play and fun. Chaos is kept on the edge and focus is on innovation (Chitu, 2006). The sprawling campus at its headquarters at Mountain View, Santa Clara, California, is a 1.3 million square foot space area with a disorderly arrangement of two-storey buildings (Lashinsky, 2006). The cafeterias are always free and the conference rooms and hallways are crammed with people for talk-sessions and brainstorming. There are sandy volleyball courts all around the space for motor-bikes to scoop around. Employees are diligent, sincere and target-oriented but they do not much worry about making money. Anecdotal evidence would help throw some light on the versatile and humanistic organizational culture. In the year 2006, Sheryl Sandberg, the then Vice president of Google and head of the automated advertising system, committed a historic blunder leading to Googles loss of substantial amount of money. When she understood the scale and impact of the mistake committed, she went on to inform Larry Page, Googles co-founder and American business magnet in 2011. She said, "God, I feel really bad about this," and was well accepted for her apology. To her surprise, Page’s answer left her absolutely spell-bound. He said, "Im so glad you made this mistake.” That is because he wants to run a company where they are moving very fast and doing a lot without caring much about the immediate future. Hence, if they are not making any mistakes, then that means that they just not taking enough risks (Lashinsky, 2006). Patrik Reali, one of Google’s technical employees at Zurich, was taking a break from his Star Trek pinball game and stopped to appreciate the work culture at Google, saying that it feels good and comfortable to be working at Google. He further said that at Google there are nice places for retreat and hanging-around. Each floor has a different colour and theme pattern to imbibe vibrancy and break redundancy in formal office spaces. He described about the location of a history section on the fifth floor that comes with old library, adorned with heavy velvet curtains and second-hand chairs. The fourth floor again is assigned as the green environment floor, provided with a terrace for outdoor eating. Switzerland is the theme of the third floor, with improvised gondolas, snow-looking carpets or blue ice and an unconventional penguin mascot. To elaborate further on the benefits of Google’s interactive and colourful office space design, Jones Lang LaSalle’s research insight might be helpful. According to her research finding, a global office, a company, a management firm or a global enterprise is capable of fostering more teamwork by building more open-demand meeting rooms against traditional hierarchical-order floor plans and corner offices spaces (Culp, 2008). The key characteristics of Google’s unique culture and organizational structure, epitomises highest degree of management innovation, a vibrant change of structure and leadership style representing ultimate leadership. The drive is always for a conscious management paradigm. Google’s system and office culture focuses on a core functional area of increasing customer value and inherently un-imitable product and services. The key features are delaying, peer-to-peer network and opportunities of more self-organization. 3. Google’s Management Style Better management practices are necessary to achieve a level of cooperation and coordination in the best interests on individuals and those within the organization. As an innovative and paradigm shift to the traditional approaches of management, Hamels concept of management innovation proclaims of an organizational culture wherein everybody has a voice of their own and there is full scale opportunity to practice team-work and participation in the peer decision processes. Fast emerging as the future tool for management, Hamels management 2.0 suggests of an innovation democracy culture for better integration and coordination of goal-setting and resource allocation into more intense and competitive business environments (Hamel and Breen, 2007). Hamel, while praising Google in his book ‘The Future of Management’ (Hamel and Breen, 2007) mentioned that a conventional pro-market management system is totally disregarded by Google. 95% of Google’s revenues trace back to the Web-based search advertising, which is a fantastically profitable product that even covers for many unprofitable ones (Iyer and Davenport, 2008). Even when there was a sloughing in the process of explosive growth, the most innovative employees got drifted to form their own ventures. Through an adoption of strict discipline to the process of innovation or even rearing its talent pool, Google has even successfully survived the ruthless winds of recession, despite maintain its outlook of just any other internet business company. To sum up, Google management approach is based on three major ideas. Firstly, setting out clear criteria on quantitative and qualitative goals, such as the range of the market and the passion to achieve it is necessary to plan. Secondly, Google’s ideal innovative portfolio is capable of integrating the concepts of improvement and potentials for business growth. Thirdly, the drive to adopt a diversified and customer-friendly value chain approach is its key driver to innovation (Iyer and Davenport, 2008; Anthony, 2009). Harvard Business Review Report by Iyer and Davenport (2008) further describes on how Google has been retaining some age-old, unaccomplished visions of IT technology that might not seem profitable conventionally anymore. Hence, as a company, one should do more to make more money. But the IT pundits of Google possess a long-term strategic mission to rule out short-term profitability and invest more on innovation and efficiency. This might take time as a quality offering requires more investment of time and patience, at the same time not losing track of its customers and their aspirations. Every employee, including managers at Google, need to invest time to innovation, segregating each segment on the basis of project management, core research, advertising, product and business development. Interestingly, there is special position in the name of Director-of-Help, which was created to exclusively manage new products and businesses, ascribed to a 10% of the time of managers at Google (Iyer and Davenport, 2008). Additionally, non-technical and non-managerial employees are not assigned any discretionary time whatsoever. Engineers have to spend 80% of their time to core-search and rest 20% on technical projects of their own (Iyer and Davenport, 2008). A strong vigil is maintained on to see that each of the slice, especially the 20% segment is well managed, although no limit is set on a weekly or even monthly targets, giving some leniency to them too (Iyer and Davenport, 2008). It is absolutely natural to see that an engineer is spending six months on core search and only assign few hours to his personal project. And even then, with this much of time allocation, the employees were seen to come-up with innovative ideas on business and products, accounting for half of all the new products and features (for example, Gmail, Adsense and Google News) developed at around 2008 (Iyer and Davenport, 2008). Google’s novel management innovation is the key to its sustainability approach. Its structural features deviate from the traditional hierarchical management to greater informality and opportunities of performance-based management. Google’s brink and chaos management style epitomises passion and healthy informality to initiate more development and customer-focussed, bottom-up approach. 4. Google’s Motivational Approach as a Role Model Motivation is all about empowering employees with a directed objective to achieve a common goal. For this, all need to be on the same page with respect to values, motives, proposition and individual attainment too. Again, cost efficiency, product innovation, quality, customer responsiveness, new business development are imperative to organizational excellence and typically require employees to fulfil multiple organizational roles for profit generation and establishing a true brand image in a highly competitive market. Business organizations are built around the elements of sector, geographical organization region, functional organization, customer-focussed groups, distribution-channel organization and organizations for fostering new business development. A company can make more profits and acquire employee job satisfaction by integrating sophisticated technology and expertise and developing a multiplicity of capabilities across different levels of the enterprise (Galbraith, 2005). As per Hamels clear indication, Google has been fast riding on a strategy to invent a future of management. This approach is hugely inspired from the conceptualisation of the complexity theory. This theory might be widely accepted in terms of organizational management but it fails to take into consideration the intricate styles and details of management. Complexity theory is delimited by the inability to analyse and predict the role of top management as decision makers. The theory fails to explicate on the organizational details of complex organizations in competitive environments. This stresses on the need of looking for innovative organizational management theories which establish simple rules of managerial action, maintaining a high degree of adaptive tension that posits the organization in a balance of chaos and tension, spurring the drive for continuous innovation and evolution (Grant, 2008). In the case of Google, uniqueness is its key to innovation. Unconstrained efforts lead to lack of discipline in ideas affecting material end-results. However, right constraints may work as innovation accelerators which essentially focus on creativity. It is clear that Google is not after things others are. Using a bottom-up approach, new ideas keep emanating from its employees in a prescribed system of time and allocation. From one of the comments procured from the blog site of Google in 2008, it was mentioned by an employee that they do not believe it to be a matter of doing something in their spare time, but more actively making time to do it. Till that time around, the employee was upset with the idea of not having a good 20% project which he needed to posses in order to positively impact his review (Iyer and Davenport, 2008). Google never adhered to any form of dirty work and been always adopting a process oriented approach to high priority ideas through resource allocation. What Google has been doing is to couple its world-class approach to the front-end innovation through discipline, notwithstanding the fact that a balance between two is tough to achieve (Anthony, 2009). Right from a fresh-hire to the top-level CEO at Google, they firmly believe in a framework for the future. The plan is to remain being irrelevant, self-confident and presumptuous, although their employees do not perceive it in this manner. Shona Brown’s book provides an interesting view to the perspective of Structured Chaos. While structured chaos might have an immediate impending effect upon productivity, a naturalistic state between a disciplined order and uncontrolled chaos might be helpful for organizations who want to take their time to settle into a stable equilibrium without falling apart. This intermediate zone is most vibrant, surprising and flexible and is known as the edge of chaos. Edge of chaos refers to a complicated, uncontrolled, unpredictable yet adaptive way of self-behaviour that is partially based on past experiences, while staying focussed on the current executions. The challenge is to achieve a balance so that manager are not too much stuck in the past or even over-planning about the future, risking to fall off on either side. In simple terms, it is all about focussing on today without losing sight of the past or future (Brown and Eisenhardt, 1988). Flexible organizational capabilities impart immense opportunities to improvise on product design, motivation and communication channels to foster more business development and functional diversification. The employee commitment is high through an end-to-end involvement of an employee in the process chain. Through decentralization and more flexibility, emerging business opportunities are nurtured through by employees with the help of extensive research and dedication to improvisation. 5. Collaborative Effort and Team Work within Google Employees The innovative potential of the edge of chaos is the secret for this ordered-disorderliness balanced proposition of Google Company. Ontologically, literature has revealed that innovation has been mostly the work of single entrepreneurs or entrepreneur duos at the maximum. As a good example, the brilliant legendary games designer, Shigeru Miyamoto of Nintendu, Rockefeller at Stanford Oil, Henry Ford at Ford Motor Company, Steve Jobs at Apple amongst many more. The presence of powerful competitors might drive the zeal of such entrepreneurs who pursue their uncompromising vision, but again authoritatively. One of the greatest demerits of such innovations including the innovative open-source software Linux is that, even if these projects at a later date migrate onto a community venture, with time their growth process slows down. On the contrary, group-based behaviour welcomes conformity, group-thinking, collective delusion and madness of the crowds (Menschel, 2002). Hamels faith is in agreement with Warren Buffets beliefs that the quality of a decision is inversely proportional to the number of people involved in it. Organizational research has so far only concentrated on individual motivation, ignoring the precursors and outcomes of team-based effort. A group identity generates shared values and common beliefs. The parameters which differentiate the less committed members of the group from the real ones on the basis of their distant beliefs, disagreement to the shared values and goals which transliterates into the social function (Kay, 2008). However, on a serious note, Google’s development and product management teams coherently work in small cohesive groups. Everyone at Google is on a lookout to trap maximum creativity through a unique approach to maximize effectively within a very short span of innovative cycle. Google has earned a good name for itself in the internet industry so far but it is not only about flaunting their wealth through fancy show-offs. The founders consistently ensured that when they bring a team of people under one-roof to work for Google, there should be immense possible of exchange of ideas and imaginations. The built-in environment is extremely interactive, with colourful, original human spaces. The last concept is a deliberate strategy to exclude any opportunity for creating private spaces of communality, as the employees hail from multi-diversified backgrounds, ethnicity and geographies (Brown and Eisenhardt, 1988; Culp, 2008; Grant, 2008) Another Sri-Lankan employee at Google California’s headquarters holds a view that the experience to be a part of Google is so unique and different and it would not be surprising if they are being envied by other competitors, situated close-by, for their out-of-the box thinking. The employees do not fail to exert on the point that every employee at Google has a poignant say in every matter. That is say, all employees are kept in loop regarding what is happening and everyone is well-informed (Culp, 2008). Famous entrepreneur authors Larry Page and Sergey Brin emphasise on the fact that Google’s team-spirit is focused on creating a unique work environment wherein talented, hard working people are duly rewarded for their contributions to creativity and core research in a collaborative setting. This approach of rewarding innovation and creativity for group-wide initiatives as well as the 20% slice of individual creative researches, Google has been selected as the most desirable company to work for by applicants across the world. Undoubtedly, Google has been capable of attracting the brightest and most brilliant of talent pool from all around the world, maintaining its collaborative work environment (Brin and Page, n.d.). The characteristics of Google organizational structure is let free to experiment collaborate and self-select the projects. In this process of small-group-based approach, employees have a considerable freedom to play a key-role to place Google to the next-stage of development. Team work together and execute projects to finesse. 6. Conclusion and Recommendations Google Company’s case study is a clear indication of the fact that in order to stand out in the race for quality and consistency, it is mandatory to improvise and create innovation. The general understanding, especially for a technologically-dependant company is to invest extensive time and resources in a limited structure and set timelines. All this accrues at all levels of an enterprise, technical, non-technical or even managerial cadre. The employees need to have strict defined responsibilities to their account and prioritise on achieving them. Consequently, improvisation and innovation is unavoidable as this is the only means to create new products and services and one abridged with the latest developments in fast trending marketing and technology markets. The secret is to strike a right balance between a disciplined structuring of businesses and at the same time being flexible and creative. Organizers need to be caution of the chaos trap which might limit their flexibility and creative potential for new discoveries. As been mentioned previously in the discussion, Hamel’s prescribed innovative and evolving management inspires the employees to continually come-up with new ideas with considerable degree of freedom at Google. According to him, internet is the best guide for the future of management, because internet technology provides the possibility of enhancing and integrating spontaneous efforts through a social and coordinated platform. Markets only lend a support in terms of assembling all human-efforts using internet serving the lines of communication. This middle-line approach is most effective form of coordination as the tarps of bureaucracy and hierarchy could be reduced in this case. Google management is never in hurry or a rat race with its competitors for more. They believe in the fact that the future is to contemplate and build on its own rather than predicting what is the future to be like. In each of the previous sections, starting with the work organization and culture to team-based organization and management within Google Company, the study has deliberated on a standard approach to adopt balanced chaos within an enterprise. Rules, priorities, responsibility and focus are important to enforce discipline in an organization. However, sticking to a rigid organizational structure might limit the creative potential and personal motivation to research for a technologically intensive enterprise, such as Google. Analogically, this case study has explored that experimentation is good for evolution; markets, bureaucracy and hierarchical structure mostly deal with the board and traditional intrinsic and extrinsic organizational mechanisms and power and democratization of power, choice and preferences helps breed a pluralistic value system, beneficial to the growth of the business. Reference List Anthony, D. S., 2009. Google’s Management Style Grows Up. Harvard Business. [online] Available at: [Accessed 7 January 2015]. Brin, S. and Page, L., no date. Searching For Success: How Google Became Great. [online] Available at: [Accessed 8 January 2015]. Brown, L. S. and Eisenhardt, M. K., 1988. Competing on the edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos. Harvard: Harvard Business Press. Chitu, A., 2006. Innovation, Emerging from Google Chaos, Google Operating System - Unofficial news and tips about Google. [online] Available at: [Accessed 7 January 2015]. Culp, N. S., 2008. 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Ethics in organizations: A Chaos Perspective. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 15(4), pp. 359-381. Iyer, B. and Davenport, H. T., 2008. Reverse Engineering Google’s Innovation Machine. [online] Available at: [Accessed 7 January 2015]. Kay, J., 2008. Bankers, Like Gangs, Just Get Carried Away. [online] Available at: [Accessed 8 January 2015]. Lashinsky, A., 2006. Chaos by Design. [online] Available at: [Accessed 7 January 2015]. Menschel, R., 2002. Markets, Mobs & Mayhem: How to Profit from the Madness of Crowds. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons. Peters, T. and Rodabaugha, K., 1988. Thriving on Chaos: Handbook for a Management Revolution. The Journal of Continuing Higher Education, 36(2), pp. 27-28. Read More