What Would Google Do? Part 5

2. Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.

3. Conversations among human beings sound sound human. They are conducted in a human voice. human. They are conducted in a human voice.

4. Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments, or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.

5. People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.

6. The internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of ma.s.s media.

In every interaction you have with your const.i.tuents, speak with a human voice as if you were speaking face-to-face. Be boldly, bluntly honest when admitting your mistakes-and when disagreeing with the public. Lock your PR people away. And remember, everything you say is searchable. Think of Google as the angel on your shoulder keeping you honest.

Be transparent

My life is an open blog. On the "about" page on my site, I try to practice what I preach about transparency. I reveal my business relationships: the companies for which I work, write, speak, and consult. I reveal personal relationships: companies where I used to work, where I have friends, and even where I have been turned down for jobs. I list stocks I own. I sometimes write about religion, so I reveal mine. As I often write about politics, I reveal my views and-to the horror of traditional journalists-my votes. This page is my defense against an accusation that I might try to hide affiliations, opinions, or conflicts of interest. At the end of this book, I will also make relevant disclosures.

I'll throw out this challenge to you in your organization: Why keep secrets? Or why keep more secrets than you have to? I've heard the argument: Your compet.i.tors will steal good ideas. But transparency will build a relationship of trust with your const.i.tuents and open up new opportunities. The ethic of transparency sums up much of what has come before in this book: the need to involve your const.i.tuents in your process, the need to hand over control through openness and information, the benefits of open-source networks, the benefits of the gift economy, the ability to listen.

But I must acknowledge the irony of advocating transparency in a book about Google, which in many ways is as opaque and secretive as d.i.c.k Cheney. You can't get into a Google office without signing a nondisclosure agreement. Google won't reveal details of its revenue split with sites that run its ads. It refuses to list its Google News sources. It won't tell us how many servers it has. It chooses not to use open-source software for some functions, like managing its cloud of computers, so it can retain a proprietary advantage.

Still, as we've just discussed, Google does develop most of its products in public by releasing unfinished versions and getting help from users. In that sense, it is unusually transparent, willing to work in the open and involve its users in development. I suggest you follow Google's example in its product development and ignore its silence and opaqueness elsewhere.

Collaborate

If you don't open up, you can't collaborate. Collaboration with customers is the highest and most rewarding form of interactivity, for that is when the public tells you what they want in a product before you've made it. If you're lucky, they'll take ownership in the product you create together. They won't just buy it, they'll also brag about it.

I have tried to make this book collaborative. I didn't put chapters online as I turned them out to have readers correct and edit them, as other authors have done; that is too after-the-fact. Nor did I try to make the book a product of democracy ("vote on what I should say"); deciding what to say is, in the end, my job. Instead, I discussed ideas in the book on my blog as I researched them and thought them through and asked readers for guidance, which they generously gave. The chapter "Google Mutual Insurance" that follows is a product purely of that discussion.

Collaboration is good business. Michael Dell spoke to me about "co-creation of products and services," a radical notion from a big company whose policy had once been to look at and not touch its blogging customers. Now it tries to make, change, and support products collaboratively. "I'm sure there's a lot of things that I can't even imagine but our customers can imagine," Dell said. "A company this size is not going to be about a couple of people coming up with ideas. It's going to be about millions of people and harnessing the power of those ideas." Once you can hear them.

Start by letting your customers into the genesis of your products: your design process. Impossible, you protest: It's a secret. Well, why is that? By closing off design, you're also closing yourself off from the best ideas of the people who need, buy, and care about your product. Think how much more valuable your products and company would be if you were to give your customers exactly what they want. Take one project or product and try being radically transparent about it (as we will explore in the chapter, "Manufacturing"). Blog about your plans and decisions. Join in conversations-human conversations-with customers. Ask people what you should do. Admit mistakes. Open up.

Your compet.i.tive advantage is not that your designs are secret but that you have a strong relationship with your community of customers. I'm not suggesting that you hand over design to a committee of the whole. That would be like turning over the boardroom to a giant focus group. Design cannot come out of town-hall meetings. It's still your job to come up with good ideas, to invent, inspire, surprise-and to execute well. Companies are not democracies. But neither should they be dictatorships. They should be-but too rarely are-meritocracies. Your challenge is to get good ideas to surface and survive from within and without and to enable customers and employees to improve your ideas and products.

Don't be evil

We can't leave a chapter about ethics and Google without addressing its famous self-admonition: "Don't be evil." Larry Page and Sergey Brin interpreted the pledge this way in a letter they wrote before their 2004 initial public offering: "We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served-as shareholders and in all other ways-by a company that does good things for the world even if we forego some short-term gains. This is an important aspect of our culture and is broadly shared within the company."

They defined good behavior as delivering unbiased search results and not accepting payment for advantage in listings. They vowed to clearly label advertising, comparing their policy with newspapers' rules. They set themselves apart from marketers, saying: "We believe it is important for everyone to have access to the best information and research, not only to the information people pay for you to see."

One could see their covenant on evil either as the height of hubris-Google declaring itself the headquarters of corporate virtue-or as a case of saying what should be a.s.sumed. It necessarily raises questions about whether Google is living up to its credo. Google has censored search results in China, arguing that it is better to bring a hampered internet there than no internet at all. I don't agree and believe that Google has more power than it knows to pressure countries around the world to respect openness and free speech. Google, like Yahoo, has handed over information to governments-Google in India, Yahoo in China-that led to users being arrested simply for what they said. As an American and a First Amendment absolutist, I'd call that evil. I think that Google's lack of transparency about advertising splits is not evil but is also not virtuous business. Some would argue that Google is the bad guy for making money off news headlines while news organizations are struggling; I disagree and say that Google is doing news sites the favor of sharing audience. Some would say that Google can do evil with the private information it has about our searches, clicks, and even health history; I don't think we've seen evidence of misuse yet.

Is Google a monopoly? In 2008, as the U.S. Justice Department began an ant.i.trust inquiry into Google's deal to sell ads for Yahoo, New York Times columnist Joe Nocera reported that Sourcetool.com had filed a complaint against Google for raising the company's ad rates prohibitively high. Google's algorithms and employees found that Sourcetool did not meet its standards; it resembled a spam site, whether or not it was one. The rate increase was Google's way of shooing off the site. Sourcetool disagreed and said Google was ruining its legitimate business. The implication was that Google could wield the power of the monopoly. But in the Google age, nothing is as it seems. The issue is not that Google is a monopoly but that it has become the the marketplace-the best place for us to find information and for advertisers to find us-as newspapers were in their time and as craigslist is today. Marketplaces have the power to unilaterally charge what the market will bear. craigslist sets most of its ad rates to zero. Google says it doesn't set rates but enables the market to do the job in auctions. Except in the case of Sourcetool, Google did unilaterally set the rate. The question is whether we trust Google with the power to do that. Is Google a monopoly? Not yet. marketplace-the best place for us to find information and for advertisers to find us-as newspapers were in their time and as craigslist is today. Marketplaces have the power to unilaterally charge what the market will bear. craigslist sets most of its ad rates to zero. Google says it doesn't set rates but enables the market to do the job in auctions. Except in the case of Sourcetool, Google did unilaterally set the rate. The question is whether we trust Google with the power to do that. Is Google a monopoly? Not yet.

The next question is whether Google can live by its golden rule as it grows huge and gangly-as middle managers start second-guessing their bosses, as bonuses and greed or simple self-interest overtake the gospel according to Google. Time will tell.

Is Google evil then? On balance, I don't think so. But its day is still young. At least Google is trying to be good. That's more than one can say for some companies I'm sure we both could name. Wouldn't other companies do well to make the same pledge on evil? It should be chiseled over doors on Wall Street. If only, in the poisoned process that led to the financial crisis of 2008, enough people had asked whether seeking and issuing toxic mortgages and making and selling toxic a.s.sets were evil-instead of someone else's problem-I wonder whether we'd have reached that nadir.

Imagine if in cable company meetings on pricing and bundling or restricting internet access someone were to ask: Is this the best we can do for our customers? Are we exploiting them? Is this evil? Imagine if someone were to ask at the meeting where airlines chose to fight a New York State law requiring that pa.s.sengers be given clean air and water: Is this any way to treat our pa.s.sengers? Aren't we being evil? I wouldn't much like to be that person-Mr. Goody-Goody, director of whistle-blowing, vice president of virtue. But I do believe that if companies were to ask themselves-and employees were empowered to ask-whether they were being good or evil to their customers and communities, they would often make different decisions. It's not a bad rule.

Wal-Mart made news early in 2008 when it sued a former employee who had been hit by a truck and left severely brain-damaged. The store wanted to recoup what it had paid for her care after she won a $1 million judgment against the trucking company. After legal fees, the victim received $417,000; Wal-Mart sued to recover $470,000, which would have left the employee's family with nothing to pay for nursing-home care. Wal-Mart was apparently within its legal and contractual rights to recover money; that's what the fine print said. But if just one person had asked the right question in the memos or meetings about this case-Is this evil?-the company would have saved itself horrible publicity on network news, in papers, and in blogs from people who used the story as exhibit A, proof that Wal-Mart is evil. Eventually, the company backed down and did the right thing: It dropped its suit against the brain-damaged woman. But the PR damage cost more than the money at stake. "Don't be evil" is good business.

That was the point made by Umair Haque as he excoriated Facebook later in 2008 for preventing Google from using Facebook members' data (with their consent). On his Harvard Business Review blog, Haque called Facebook evil. That's a bit strong, I'd say, but he was making a business point: "What's really going on here? There's a ma.s.sive tectonic shift rocking the economic landscape. All these players are discovering that the boardroom's first and most important task is simply to try always and everywhere [to] do less evil. In the dismal language of economics: as interaction explodes, the costs of evil are starting to outweigh the benefits."

Let's repeat that and dub it Haque's Law: As interaction explodes, the costs of evil are starting to outweigh the benefits. That, I think, is what Google is talking about when it promises not to be evil. It is not a campaign pledge or a geeky Bible lesson about good and bad. It is a calculated business rule: When people can openly talk with, about, and around you, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g them is no longer a valid business strategy.

New Speed

Answers are instantaneous Life is live Mobs form in a flash

Answers are instantaneous

Google has spoiled us rotten. Think back to the time before Google-it was only a decade ago-and remember the mines you had to dig to find any bit of information. Good G.o.d, we actually went to libraries. We waited for answers and went without them. Now I ask Google a question, any question, and it brags that it has given me the answer in fractions of a second. I wanted to tell you just how fast that is compared to, say, the blink of an eye. So what did I do? Of course, I asked Google how fast an eye blinks and in .3 seconds it told me that a blink takes .3 seconds.

One of Google's own principles-the "10 things Google has found to be true"-is: "Fast is better than slow." A pillar of its design principles-from Google's list of what makes a design Googley-is: "Every millisecond counts.... Speed is a boon to users. It is also a compet.i.tive advantage that Google doesn't sacrifice without good reason." Speed is a tenet of the Google religion.

Google has made us an impatient people, more than we know. If we can get any of the world's knowledge in a blink, why should we wait on hold or in line or until your office opens? Why should anyone give us incomplete information when completeness is a search away? We want what we want, and there's no reason we shouldn't have it-now.

Every industry is affected by this new speed. Fashion-as practiced in international chains such as Zara and H&M-reacts to new styles overnight. A trend comes off the runway and it's imitated-flattered, that is-in a flash. Information on what is and isn't selling is fed back constantly so stores can adjust their stock and even the companies' manufacturing and design. Speed becomes not only a compet.i.tive advantage but also a strategic necessity. The more quickly businesses can adjust to customers' actions and desires-the more quickly they can learn from them and try to stay ahead of them-the better business will be.

A lack of speed is a strategic disadvantage. Many industries are saddled with slowness because they are trapped by atoms and complexity. Automobiles are fashion products but because their machinery and supply chains are so complex, they cannot exploit new trends (and gas prices) until the trends are already out of date. (Is there an alternative? I'll brainstorm about that in the chapter, "The Googlemobile.") The book publishing industry is shamefully slow. I negotiated the contract for this book about a year before you got it in your hands (and by the way, I've been meaning to thank you for picking it up). That's d.a.m.ned speedy for a book. As other forms of knowledge, entertainment, and content creation speed up, so must books. (I'll explore that, too, in the chapter, "GoogleCollins.") Education prides itself on not being speedy. As an academic, I appreciate the virtues of deliberation, of ideas being reviewed and challenged, of knowledge fermenting over time. But those of us who teach students in rapidly changing arenas (I teach digital journalism) must get better at keeping up with-no, at getting ahead of-our students, industry, and society.

Perhaps only religion can claim exemption from the imperative for speed. If any inst.i.tution relies more on permanence than hastiness, G.o.d's does.

Google, like G.o.d, values permanence. In its search results, Google gives more credence to sites that have been online long enough to build a reputation over time via clicks and links-this is the essence of PageRank. As a result, Google's search has been better at delivering completeness and relevance than currency. Google is not great at surfacing the latest links on a topic. Google has fresh links in its database because it constantly and quickly sc.r.a.pes the web to find the latest content, but until those new entrants gather more links and clicks, it's hard for Google's algorithms to know what to make of them. Could this be a c.h.i.n.k in Google's armor?

Life is live

Just as Google and the rest of us start to get our hands around currency-finding the latest-the web speeds up even more. The internet is going live.

I have broadcast live video to the world on the internet from my Nokia phone-no satellite truck, no microwave hookups, no broadcast tower or cable company, just me and my phone, live. The next time a big news event happens-a 9/11 in New York, a 7/7 in London, or an earthquake in China-witnesses will have the ability not only to capture but also to share with the world what they see as they see it.

Live video from witnesses will have a profound impact on news networks. They have begged witnesses to send in their tips, photos, and videos-after the fact. When a student at Virginia Tech University went on a shooting spree in 2007, a fellow student recorded the sound of the shots with his camera-phone. He sent the video to CNN, which took more than an hour to vet it and get it on-air and online. If that student had been broadcasting using a phone on live video services such as Qik.com and Flixwagon.com, he wouldn't have sent anything to CNN but would have been sharing the video on his own. CNN's choice would be whether to link to the student's broadcast or embed it on its web page or in its broadcast. It could not delay the decision, for then the live video would not have been live anymore.

When China's Sichuan Province suffered its horrendous earthquake in May 2008, people who felt it firsthand shared their experience via Twitter, a microblogging platform that enables users to send and receive 140-character-long updates to friends who follow them on the web or via short-message services on their mobile phones. Twitter was cofounded by Evan Williams, one of the creators of the company that built Blogger, which revolutionized publishing. Now he has taken publishing mobile and live. I was shocked that this service, just two years old, had spread to China-but then, I, too, sometimes forget the internet's ability to spread in an instant, distance be d.a.m.ned. What isn't shocking is that people in the quake zone would use Twitter to update friends. That's what it is made for. If I were going through a quake, I'd want to tell family and friends that I was safe, wouldn't you?

Twitter is becoming the canary in the news coal mine. Developers at the BBC and Reuters picked up on Twitter's potential and created applications to monitor it for news catchwords such as "earthquake" and "evacuate." Journalists search Twitter to find witnesses to interview and quote. During the Sichuan quakes, Twitter user casperodj wrote, "CREEPY! while i'm typing, there's an aftershock hitting!" News organizations also search Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, and blogs to find photos and videos that witnesses record, long before professional photographers arrive.

Imagine the problem the live web presents to Google: How can it search for and find things as they are happening? Oddly, Wikipedia can be quicker at updating current information than otherwise-speedy Google. It carried the news of Tim Russert's and Paul Newman's deaths before major news sites. During momentous events such as the 2004 tsunami, Wikipedians maintained entries with up-to-the-minute news. In the John Henry duel of man and machine, it's nice to see man winning one. Perhaps we need more human-powered means of recognizing what's new and what's hot-that is what the search service Mahalo contends and that is a core value of human-powered aggregator Digg. There is a business opportunity in finding currency-complementing Google's completeness-for news organizations, industry trade groups, aggregators, and bloggers.

Live brings an important benefit to the web: It makes the internet interactive, person-to-person, nose-to-nose. When something is happening live online, we can have conversations around it, we can share the same experience and discuss it, we can influence events. But it also makes the web perilous for businesses being talked about-unless they have the facility to listen to and join the conversation as it happens.

Mobs form in a flash

In this live connection machine, people of similar interests and goals-call them communities or call them mobs-can find each other, coalesce, organize, and act in an instant. Howard Rheingold dubbed them Smart Mobs Smart Mobs in the t.i.tle of his 2002 book. Rheingold chronicled the fall of Philippine president Joseph Estrada at the hands of a smart mob of tens of thousands who were gathered together in only an hour by SMS messages on phones that told them to "Go 2 EDSA," an address in Manila, and to "Wear blck." in the t.i.tle of his 2002 book. Rheingold chronicled the fall of Philippine president Joseph Estrada at the hands of a smart mob of tens of thousands who were gathered together in only an hour by SMS messages on phones that told them to "Go 2 EDSA," an address in Manila, and to "Wear blck."

On a much less grand and profound scale, I watched Twitter form mobs at the South by Southwest conference in Austin in 2008 after attendees excitedly swarmed to the most antic.i.p.ated party-Google's, of course-only to find a line three geeks thick running three blocks long. One of those would-be partiers, Gary Vaynerchuk, a tech-savvy wine merchant and video blogger you'll hear from later, in the chapter on retail, decided to chuck the Google party and make his own. He used his phone to send a message to Twitter asking who wanted to join him. Vaynerchuk already had a few thousand friends following him and scores of them were in Austin. It helped that Vaynerchuk had shipped a few cases of good wine to Texas. A party formed. On Twitter, I watched as one and then another and then another of his friends told their friends they were heading to the party. It came together in minutes.

Not long after this episode, I saw tech blogger Michael Arrington, who runs the powerful TechCrunch.com, complaining loudly on Twitter-as best he could in 140-character bursts-that his Comcast internet connection had been down for 36 hours. He gave us a serial narrative about his time on hold and how he was told this was a California-wide issue (though fellow Californians replied on Twitter that they had no problems). Arrington went to a friend's house to get on the internet and Twittered that he would use his blog to make Comcast miserable. I linked to this on my blog and speculated that with Arrington's reach, he'd gather a Twitter mob in an instant. Something surprising happened instead: Comcast called Arrington and sent technicians out to fix the problem. They had monitored Twitter and read about his difficulty. Other bloggers and Twitterers were dubious and said so, but a Comcast rep responded to them on Twitter, proving he was there and listening. Comcast knows that it has to be on top of the conversation as it happens. Every second counts.

The internet has caused you to lose control of so much-brand, message, price, compet.i.tion, secrecy-but more than anything, you've lost control of timing. You can no longer decide when to put your story out or when to answer critics. You can't subject your customers to waiting on hold-no matter how often you tell them that their call matters to you-without them complaining, revolting, and leaving quickly and publicly. The idea of holding back products and popping them out as surprises insults your customers (well, unless you're Apple). The earlier they're involved in your process, the better. The internet has changed the speed, the rhythm, and the process of business and next will do the same to government.

When customers come looking for you on Google, you'd better have answers to their questions on your web site before they are asked. When customers talk about you in public, you'd better have the means to hear and respond. It's simple for a compet.i.tor with a better answer to steal your customers in a flash.

New Imperatives

Beware the cash cow in the coal mine Encourage, enable, and protect innovation Simplify, simplify Get out of the way

Beware the cash cow in the coal mine

Sometimes, success can blind you to the oncoming possibility of failure. And fear of failure can keep you from success.

When I was TV critic for TV Guide in the mid-1990s, it still sold more copies in a year than any magazine in America. But it was slowly fading, stuck in the first stage of death: denial. Its circulation had fallen from more than 17 million a week to 15 million, then 13 million while I was there (entirely the fault of my bad taste, of course). TV Guide couldn't keep pace with the explosion of television: Dozens, then hundreds of channels wouldn't fit on the magazine's little pages. The editors tried more than once to produce a larger version with big, colorful grids, but the old readership of the magazine was stuck in its ways, addicted to listings. There was the other problem: The readers were old and getting older. As I remember, when one readership survey came back with less than the usual level of response, a follow-up study was performed to find out why people hadn't completed their questionnaires. The answer: Most of the folks who hadn't responded had died.

Meanwhile, compet.i.tion only grew. Listings were appearing on TV and computer screens, forcing TV Guide to enter those businesses. Newspapers' TV listings had long been perceived as free by readers. There was discussion of syndicating TV Guide's listings to papers-which, using Googlethink, could have spread the brand-but the magazine feared that would cannibalize the core product. Beware any strategy built on protection from cannibalization, for it probably means the cannibals are at the door and ready to eat you for lunch.

Fast-forward a dozen years, long after I'd left. In 2005, TV Guide transformed into a regular-sized magazine with big, colorful grids. At the same time, it eliminated almost all of its 140 local editions. It raised its price. And it lowered the circulation it guaranteed advertisers to 3.2 million, a dizzying drop from its high of 17 million. About then, I had lunch with my old boss from TV Guide, who had also moved on. I said the company had finally done everything we should have done a dozen years before: putting out the right product, reducing costs, and getting realistic about its legitimate circulation. Why didn't we do that? I asked rhetorically. She responded: "You know why. Because it was a cash cow."

Cash flow can blind you to the strategic necessity of change, tough decisions, and innovation. Take the fate of TV Guide as a warning: Beware the cash cow in the coal mine.

How many companies and industries fail to heed the warnings they know are there but refuse to see? The music industry is, of course, the best example of digital dead meat. Detroit waited far too long to make smaller cars and pursue electricity as a fuel. Many retail chains opened stores online but stopped there, not seeing opportunities to forge new relationships with customers as Amazon had. Telecom companies were blindsided by the emergence of open networks that undercut their businesses-even though those networks operated on the telecom companies' own wires. Ad agencies kept trying to forestall the reinvention of their industry, still buying ma.s.s media even as more targeted and efficient opportunities grew on the internet. News executives thought they could avoid change and even believed they should be immune from it because they were holders of a holy flame: Journalism with a capital J. They finally woke up when they watched the giant Knight Ridder chain get gobbled up by the McClatchy chain, which like every public company in the sector lost billions in market value. Now newsmen are willing to change, but it may be too late for them-as it was for the one-time giant TV Guide. They lost the next generations of customers. They lost their destinies because they wanted to save their pasts. Protection is not a strategy for the future.

Encourage, enable, and protect innovation

Google is well-known for giving its technical employees the chance to use 20 percent of their time to work on new ideas, new products, and new businesses. "A license to pursue your dreams," is what Google's Marissa Mayer called the policy in Fast Company magazine. A 2008 article in the Harvard Business Review by Bala Iyer and Thomas H. Davenport quoted a Google employee explaining on his blog: "This isn't a matter of doing something in your spare time, but more of actively making time for it. Heck, I don't have a good 20 percent project yet and I need one. If I don't come up with something I'm sure it could negatively impact my review." Google requires requires employees to innovate. It's part of the job. It's how workers are valued. It's how Google grows. In 2006, Mayer said that half the new products and features launched by Google in the last six months of 2005 came from work done under the 20 percent rule. employees to innovate. It's part of the job. It's how workers are valued. It's how Google grows. In 2006, Mayer said that half the new products and features launched by Google in the last six months of 2005 came from work done under the 20 percent rule.

I'm not saying that every company is like Google and could or should implement its 20 percent rule. Even Google doesn't extend the offer and expectation to all its employees (Iyer and Davenport say that's a mistake). I understand how this policy could be impractical. Maybe you've already cut so close to the bone that you fear this reallocation of time and productivity could throw you over the edge. Maybe your employees aren't built to invent-after all, not every company is populated with Ph.D.s in rocket science like Google is.

But anyone anywhere in a company could have a brilliant idea. How do you hear it? How do your employees propose new products, methods, or systems-through the dead-end suggestion box? How will they be rewarded for innovating? Who will try to stop them? Do you have a culture of innovation or is this just something you say at management meetings?