What can disrupt Google?
Google, in addition to making well-regarded products, is hailed as the company that could stand to dominate the technology landscape for a while to come. The company has accumulated a remarkable base of talent (even if some of the bloom has come off that rose) and has built up a formidable infrastructure, both of which enable it to play neatly to an emerging always-online lifestyle. Even as the company goes from strength to strength in its domination of online properties, the golden question everyone loves to ponder is how Google, the golden child of an Internet Age that doesn’t seem to going away anytime soon, might itself get disrupted.
Unlike technology changes like commodity hardware and the Internet, which disrupted IBM and Microsoft respectively, the biggest potential disruptor to Google is in fact Google itself. Google puts a high premium on its ability to maintain the atmosphere of a small, innovative startup, where innovative ideas are heard and translated within a reasonable timeframe into products. Engineers at Google are encouraged to exercise their creativity and passion without much intervention from a traditional corporate hierarchy. The flip side of this heavily peer approval-driven approach is that engineers must build extensive personal networks of influence to increase the chances that their product or feature sees the light of day. As the company continues on a trajectory of hypergrowth though, the laws of organizational physics will pose a challenge to this goal by making this web of relationships progressively harder to keep up. And Google certainly wouldn’t want its own cultural best practices to lead inadvertently to its demise. Until now, most companies that experience this transformation deal with it by creating processes that impose order on chaos, which inadvertently saps the serendipity and hallway conversations that were the life-blood of the company in the first place.
Back when Microsoft was viewed as the innovative young kid on the block, the organizational behavior literature produced several surveys of how Microsoft’s corporate culture enabled its success. MIT Sloan professor Michael Cusumano’s How Microsoft Makes Large Teams Work Like Small Teams is but one example. Now that the legal and technological abilities to form atomized enterprises are emerging, one way for Google to deal with its looming disruption is to look at how to make large enterprises work like small enterprises.
Software development organizations have long realized the value of small, driven teams, but that wisdom doesn’t necessarily translate over to the organizational side of most enterprises, who continue to stick with well-understood models of resource allocation for Traditional Enterprises. Of all the major technology-driven companies in business today, it is Google that can come up with a way of creating a functioning network of independent internal entities that collaborate effectively to advance stakeholder interests. These entities (which, as a practical matter, could be structured as JVs), would not just be maintaining a startup atmosphere–they would in fact be startups! The idea of ‘intrapreneurship’ isn’t new or foreign to Google, but pushing the envelope on that concept and changing the rules of the game are what holds the keys to keeping Google’s innovation engine firing on all cylinders.
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