The importance of creativity and innovation in a successful business is discussed, with Google being highlighted as one of the most innovative and creative companies. The article also touches on Google's organizational structure, which is described as flat and autonomous, with a focus on encouraging innovation and quality.
Contribute Materials
Your contribution can guide someone’s learning journey. Share your
documents today.
One of the most important elements in a successful business is the creativity and innovation within the business. Creativity is a mental process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts while innovation can be defined in several different ways. Overall innovation is the creation of a new idea, method or device. According to BusinessWeek, innovation today is much more than new products. Innovation is also reinventing business processes and building entirely new markets that meet customer needs. Businesses need to select and execute the right ideas, while bringing them to the market in record time. One of the most innovative and creative businesses in the world today, is Google. Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed a new approach to online search that took root in a Stanford University dorm room and quickly spread to information seekers around the globe. Google is now widely recognized as the world’s largest search engines. It is a free service that is easy to use and usually returns relevant results in a fraction of a second. Google enables you to find information in many different languages, check stock quotes, maps, headlines news, and has phonebook listings for every city in the United States. Google also allows a search for billion of images and peruse the world’s largest archive of Usenet messages. The utility and simplicity of Google has made it one of the world’s best know brands. Since September 1998, the company has grown to more than 10,000 employees worldwide, with a management team that represents some of the most experienced technology professionals in the ingdusty. Schmidt, has said, “We take our jobs to be innovators and we are failing if we are not innovating quickly enough.[6]” Many of our best ideas were envisioned by engineers who were passionate about solving a problem. Popular products, like Gmail, were initially developed by a few passionate engineers outside of their normal work. Linus Pauling is commonly quoted as saying, “The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.” Google has made its mark on the industry with new approaches to old problems. For example, our systems are built on “flaky” commodity hardware and an infrastructure that dynamically compensates for that flakiness. Initially this was a subversive idea, as other companies at the time were building servers that attempted to eliminate all failures (like the foolproof HAL9000 from 2001). We expect everything to fail and use redundancy and automated compensation techniques to maintain overall reliability. 2.1 BUILDING FOR SCALE Outside the walls of Google, this innovation factory has created desirable products for our users. Inside the walls, it has created large repositories of code, data, dependencies and information that must be managed closely. Consider the logistics of delivering at Google’s current pace: • More than 6,000 engineers and >40 offices. • 2,500 ongoing projects (2.5 developers / project). • 1,600 active external release branches for products. • 59,000 builds / day each with 10-1000 targets.. • 1.5 million tests / day, both manual and automated. • Most products localized into 40 languages. • At least bi-weekly release cycles. 2.2 FLAT & AUTONOMOUS The organizational structure we use is atypical in the industry. For one, Google is a flat organization with many Nooglers being no more than 2-3 steps below senior executives. The company structure can be characterized as: flat and autonomous. At Google, managers are not controllers, they are connectors charged with ensuring that teams make effective use of information and tools. Many managers have 15 or more direct reports, introducing some chaos and reducing the time available to micromanage. Managers are judged on their ability to enable smart people to get things done. Teams are aligned along business lines we call “focus areas” rather than around strict product lines. People doing similar work, no matter what products they are contributing to, will find themselves in close reporting proximity to their colleagues. This matrix encourages some amount of competition, but also the reuse of good ideas. Projects live and
Secure Best Marks with AI Grader
Need help grading? Try our AI Grader for instant feedback on your assignments.
die based on free-market Darwinism, where successful projects are further funded and less successful ones face atrophy. We take many short and long term bets, but projects must produce value to survive. The entire product team is responsible for quality, and is judged on their ability to enable innovation, anticipate problems, make plans, and implement high quality software. Teams adopt processes that are in their own self interest and that allow them to focus on innovation. The role of someone doing testing in this environment is structured slightly differently than other technology companies. Testers avoid becoming codependents within this system and generally do not write unit tests or other activities that are best done by the developer. Testing teams focus on higher abstractions, like identifying latencies, system or customer focused testing, and enabling the process. Code is expected to have high reliability as it is written and we adhere to a socially reinforced code review and checkin practices. Development teams write good tests because they care about the products, but also because they want more time to spend writing features and less on debugging. Teams with good testing hygiene upstream have more time to innovate, and are thus more adaptable and competitive. In addition, there is one source tree and poorly written code is quickly identified because it breaks other people’s tests and projects. Aggressive rolling back is employed to keep the tree building “green.” At an individual project level, uniformity is rarely mandated and adoption of tools and process is left to an internal “market” to decide. Apart from our core systems, discussed later, a large portion of our tools are developed by motivated individuals to solve local challenges. Similarly, process is tailored specifically to projects. While this leads to a healthy amount of chaos, good ideas tend to spread quickly, because they have been proven useful by others. Engineers decide what's best for engineering, to articulate the right vision, and to drive initiatives in the most sustainable fashion, and then others follow after grassroots successes. We’ve found that positive experience is an effective means of persuasion.