Google是如何运做的？
所有人都知道Google有多酷，但外界并不清楚，它为什么能像永动机一样持续创新。
陆陆续续的，一些关于它的奇特管理方式流传到外界：所有新雇员能得到100美元装修自己的小格子；所有员工有20%的私人时间，做自己想做的创新；比如公司里有一张ideas mailing list，所有人都可以提供建议，或者用脚投票……这都只是增加了我们对它的好奇。
最近一期Forbes有篇文章，叫Google thinks small，算是Google神话的最新诠释。文章不长，但很精彩，做些summary罢。
文章开头就说，Google的CEO Eric Schmidt在2001年进入这公司的时候就发现，这里所有人都厌恶官僚制，喜欢把事儿放桌面上讨论明白：关于一个决策，所有人都会有备而来，在会上舌灿兰花。而当决策做出，没有人会更多废话。
而且，这里的官方语言不是“我想……”，而是“数据说明……”。与我们熟知的多数商业大亨不同，Google的决策者们不相信本能，他们不会像George Soros一样在做出错误投资决策时后背疼，也不会像Alan Greenspan对自己的宏观调控策略不自信时胃酸。他们只相信数字：因为Google的产品都可以即时检测用户反应，所以也可以立即决定一条产品线的命运。一个项目有10%的认同，OK；有20%的认同，NB。失败的小组则立即解散，所有人进入其他小组。
创意-成果（ideas-and-data），这就是Google的生存法则。
这确保了公司的灵活性。Google同时进行着上百个项目，每个项目都只有极少人参与，比如Google旗下的交友网站Orkut只有3名全职员工，页面改版活科学调研则调用不过6个人，即使与Comcast合作收购AOL这样的大事件，也只有极少人参与。通常一个软件在6周内就能完成测试版。
同时它提高了经理层的效率。我们通常所知道的管理常识是，一个有效的管理者应该管7个人，在Google，经理们可以管20人甚至40人，难怪李开复要招50名关门弟子。当然，经理们并不具备太多特权，除了极少人享用个人办公室，连李开复也要与另外两个人共用小格子。
每周初，所有Google员工都要写下5行文字，记录下自己上周都做了什么，贴到内部论坛上。在这家公司里，不要轻易说哪个想法太傻，或者太大，相反Google愿意刺激员工思考，比如让大家畅想在太空建一200英里高的电梯。
毫无疑问，确保这一切顺利运转的基础是：招聘最聪明的员工。其考题变态，比如：在常数e里找出第一个10位的质数（find the first ten-digit prime number in the mathematical constant called 'e'）。通常一个人要经过8轮面试，那些表现出缺乏团队合作能力的人会剔除。
周末同学聚会，席间聊到GOOGLE，一位供职于世界排名第一的会计师事务所的同学说，他们刚给GOOGLE做完审计和验资，GOOGLE中国OFFICE开张在即，然后作为著名的“加班大师”，他一脸羡慕地对我们说，据说GOOGLE每天都有20%的工作时间是自由支配的，想干吗干吗——“一周只要工作32小时，相当于一年多了52天带薪假期啊！”——他说这话的时候，在场除了几个还在学校里逍遥快活的同学，大家的眼睛都在放光，那表情，就差流口水了。
我就问他，你呆在办公室里的时候，不好好干活上网聊天和瞎逛的时间有多少，他想了想，回答道，大约两三个小时吧。我说，GOOGLE每天的自由时间可只有一个半小时呢，他回答，那当然不一样，这一个半小时，可以早上睡懒觉，可以下午早下班。
但这对企业来说，不都是一样的吗？
——当然，这句话我没说出口——这种私营业主的思路，肯定是要遭海扁的。
IDC的报告称，美国每位员工平均每周要在工作时间中消耗5.9小时“垃圾时间”，上网处理私人业务，造成经济损失数以千亿计——那是不是就是说，互联网是办公室的大敌呢？
在那之后，我又在MSN上问了不少朋友，得到了一个相当有趣的答案——凡是坐办公室的，上班时间中至少有两三个小时是泡网的“垃圾时间”，甚至于，一天八小时大半都在网上聊天、闲逛、打游戏；而那些因为行业性质不用坐班的，在办公室里的时间倒多半是在认认真真工作；一位上班漫不经心的朋友，每天却要花上三四个小时来经营他的BLOG，办得有声有色——在家比在单位更投入，业余比专职更投入，事实就是如此。
我不禁在想，无数人的人生，除了睡眠之外，多半都花在了“工作时间”上，度过大块令人厌烦的“工作时间”，正是为了那一小部分令人快乐的“业余时间”，而最令人尴尬的是，那大块的“工作时间”中，又有相当一部分被挥霍掉了，没产生任何价值——这种人生，实在是糟糕透了。
GOOGLE的伟大，我看还不仅在于“INDEX THE WORLD”，甚至在工作制度上，都有聪明绝顶的举措。这20%的“自由时间”，正是将我们人生中的“垃圾时间”划归“有价值的时间”的尝试，是为公司和员工一起摆脱尴尬状态所作的努力，有了这20%的自由，剩下的80%时间也变得不那么令人厌烦，甚至令人愉快，毫无疑问，也更有效率。有了GOOGLE这样的公司，“工作时间”与“业余时间”完全平衡的工作状态这样的乌托邦才不会变得遥不可及。
这样看来，工作的敌人，其实不是宽带线路，而是“制度”，是“制度”造就了网络与工作的敌对态势。那些租用黄金地段写字楼的公司老板们在付出大笔租金的时候为什么不想想，“即使你不能让员工工作，至少可以阻止他们找乐子”——这种办公室哲学，是不是应该扔进垃圾桶了？
有个段子，也是在“四大会计师事务所”之一中发生的，有一天，老板发现大家都不好好干活，都在用MSN聊天，于是他决定封死MSN，作为安慰性手段，他装模作样地在办公室走廊上贴了个布告栏，上面写着“如果你们有什么需要，请告诉我”，结果第二天就有员工在下面写：“我们需要MSN！”
Google招聘网站上还有这么一段录像，一群Google的员工正在讨论公司提供的午餐以，小吃，以及“Google 15”
项目，Google 15的优胜者可以允许让新员工吃掉所有免费食物。
Google总部还提供“Googleplex”福利项目，公司内部配有医生及牙科医师，按摩，瑜珈，托儿所，女员工享有产假，
如果妻子生产，男员工也可以回家陪护，如果员工进行子女收养，公司将提供补助，另外，Google总部还有免费的洗衣，干洗店，
Google员工还可以将宠物带来办公室进行工作。
Google thinks small
It has huge sales, prodigious profits and a bid to log all the information in the world--one tiny project at a time.
Google chief executive Eric Schmidt realized he was at a new kind of company soon after joining in 2001. At a 10-person management meeting--Google employed only 180 people at the time--everyone talked, fast, about whether to put ads on Internet search results. It was a two-hour debate, and each combatant had lots of data to back up his position.
But the decision to proceed was pretty much unanimous, launching Google on a path to torrid growth.Schmidt realized this company loves to talk it out, jettisoning hierarchy, business silos and layers of management for a flatter, "networked" structure where the guy with the best data wins.
"It was a big conversation. The networked model is a conversation," says Schmidt, a brainiac engineer who worked at the famed Xerox PARC labs, then ran strategy at Sun Microsystems and was chief executive of Novell before joining Google.
Google is now at $6 billion a year in revenue and $7.6 billion in cash, employing 5,000 painstakingly chosen people. Schmidt and other insiders believe they may have found a world-changing way to run a company. (Then again, nothing Google does, in its own view, is ever average.) Most firms still look like the refining and manufacturing businesses of Rockefeller and Ford. Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, children of the Internet, have built a world where a well-chosen elite accommodates flexibility, shifting roles and, above all else, urgency.
Google prides itself on hiring only the truly brilliant (and the unabashedly arrogant, rivals say) and believes the crowd always outsmarts anyone inside it. It shares all the information it can with as many employees as possible, encouraging debate but insisting on like-minded cooperation. It also pursues a rapid-fire food-fight strategy that throws out ideas as fast as possible, to see what sticks.
Brin and Page have created a corporate organism that tackles most big projects in small, tightly focused teams, setting them up in an instant and breaking them down weeks later without remorse. "Their view is that there is much greater progress if you have many small teams going out at once," Schmidt says. The mission overall: to collect "all the world's information" and make it accessible to everyone. "It's a cause."
Hundreds of projects go on at the same time. Most teams throw out new software in six weeks or less and look at how users respond hours later. With 82 million visitors and 2.3 billion searches in a month, Google can try a new user interface or some other wrinkle on just 0.1% of its users and get massive feedback, letting it decide a project's fate in weeks.
One success in ten tries is okay; one in five is superb. Everyone from a failed venture moves to another urgent project. "If something is successful, you work it in, somehow," Schmidt says. "If it fails, you leave."
A typical task, from tweaking page designs to doing scientific research, involves six people. Orkut, a social network with several million users (most of them in Brazil and Iran), has three full-time staffers. Last month Google was reported to be in a bid to derail Microsoft's overtures to America Online by teaming up with Microsoft's cable ally, Comcast, to invest in AOL; that this didn't leak earlier may have been because only a few Googlers were in on it.
One true god rules at Google:data. The more you collect, the more you know and the more certain your decisions can be, disciples believe. Gut instinct, a staple at Barry Diller's InterActive Corp. and at Terry Semel's Yahoo, isn't in evidence at this company. "Often differences of opinion between smart people are differences of data," says Marissa Mayer, director of consumer products and among Google's first 20 employees. In some meetings people aren't allowed to say "I think … " but instead must say "The data suggest … "
Every Google employee starts the week writing five lines on what he or she did the week before. They are posted on an internal Web site for all to see. New product ideas circulate among thousands of engineers on an "ideas mailing list." An e-mail flies out every time someone posts (there are now thousands in the archive). The e-mails are half brainstorming, half a search for kindred spirits, inviting others in the crowd to join you on a project you propose.They have spawned much of the software inside everything from the Gmail e-mail product to a controversial effort to digitize thousands of books.
Caffeine and a sense of community fuel these pursuits. At the Googleplex, the crowded headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., coffee stations have urns labeled "regular" and "strong."Private offices go to only a few dozen of the brass. Even Kai-Fu Lee, the China superstar who defected to Google and sparked a lawsuit from his former employers at Microsoft, shares a cubicle with two other guys.
One key rule:You can't call any idea "stupid." (Nor is most any idea too wild. On a recent day at the Google campus a bulletin board invited workers to a session on the dream of erecting a 200-mile-high elevator into space.)
This ideas-and-data approach lets Google use fewer managers--one for every 20 line employees, compared with one for as few as 7 industrywide. "It has been as high as one to 40," Mayer says; one manager had 180 direct reports. Another benefit, she says, is that employees may be better braced should Google stock, which went public at $85 in August 2004 and is now at $340, suddenly crater. "In a downturn you want your people to feel empowered. Fear and suspicion happen when information is hidden."
Some applicants may start with one of Google's famous--and ridiculously difficult--exams. (Sample:"Find the first ten-digit prime number in the mathematical constant called ‘e'.") Prospects endure eight or more interviews. Each interviewer ranks them on a 1-to-4 scale; a 4 means "I would hire this person, and I will argue why," while a 3 means "Inclined to hire, but can be argued out of it." A panel of eight Googlers reviews the scores. Later annual regression analyses compare performance with initial ratings. One anomaly:Women with weaker scores end up performing better than women with all 4s.
"The interview still isn't picking something up," worries Mayer, a former debate champion whose rapid speech races to catch up with an even faster brain. Schmidt credits her with inventing the Google way, starting with building the Google roster. "We need generalists," she says. "Lots of projects and companies grow without doing new things; they just get bigger teams. We want projects to end."
Once deemed Google-worthy, new hires get bid on by managers across the company. Workers are asked to spend 20% of their time on something that interests them, away from their main jobs. Companywide a full 10% of time is spent dreaming up blue-sky projects.
Some brilliant prospects don't get hired, flaming out when background checks show they are difficult to work with. "It takes discipline not to hire some of these people, they are so smart," says engineering chief Alan Eustace. "But it also doesn't take much for a single person to subtract 10% from everyone else. Very quickly, that reduces your total output."
But Eric Schmidt worries how long he can make it all sing. The bigger Google gets, the harder it is to foster useful conflict and make fast decisions. And the stronger Google gets--its third-quarter net income soared sevenfold to pass $380 million on sales that almost doubled to $1.58 billion--the more it comes into the crosshairs of sniping detractors.
The Association of American Publishers is suing Google over its plans to scan the contents of several major libraries, fearing large-scale copyright infringement. "Their attitude is that we don't get it, we are flat-earth people, and they are in a hurry without time for all this," says the publisher group's president, former congresswoman Patricia Schroeder. "Their model is to get all the content for free--great for them," she says, predicting, "They'll do the same to the movie industry. Hollywood won't like it."
Marc Meyer, who knew Schmidt at UC, Berkeley and worked with him at PARC, says Schmidt sees a day when Google will hold everyone's data on a "trust me" basis. "He told me, ‘If you want it to be private, don't put it in a computer,'" says Meyer, now at a recent tech startup. "Eric has an Anakin Skywalker conundrum. He has absolute power, and it will be hard to resist the Dark Side."
Schmidt counters:"I joined a small company full of smart guys, and it still feels like that. We just have to change outside perceptions."
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