Google's Innovation and Creativity

This essay examines Google's remarkable success through the lens of creativity and innovation. It highlights how Google's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, developed a novel approach to online search, transforming it into a global phenomenon. The essay delves into Google's organizational structure, emphasizing its flat and autonomous nature, which fosters a culture of innovation. It discusses how Google manages its massive scale, including thousands of engineers, numerous projects, and a high volume of daily builds and tests. The essay also explores Google's approach to quality assurance, emphasizing the responsibility of the entire product team and the focus on higher-level testing rather than micromanagement. Finally, it underscores the importance of internal markets for tools and processes, allowing for the rapid spread of successful ideas and fostering a dynamic, adaptable environment. The essay uses Google as a case study to illustrate how a culture of innovation, coupled with effective management practices, can lead to exceptional business growth and market dominance.

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

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.