What if Google...

How many conversations start off with the phrase "What if Google...". When businesses try to do something different, especially something innovative or disruptive one of the quick lead in questions to that conversation starts with "What if Google were trying to do this?" or "What would we do if Google entered this market?".

It seems that Google is the fairly universally viewed as the thought leader of the current business age. There are even books available such as The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture and others. Google approaches
things differently. They give their engineers one day a week to "do whatever"... just suggesting that as a possiblity in many companies will at a minimum get you a look like you have three heads.

One of the questions that DeMarco asks in Slack is "Is Google in a Hurry?" Certainly, from an outside point of view they don't appear like they are. If they were how could they spare time to let their developers chase ideas for a full 20% of their time? Google rolls out releases on a regular basis sure, but accross a very large product line and they are small. When they do roll out new products or significant releases they roll out a beta first, let people volunteer to move, thus getting a willing guinee pig audience who will tolerate some experimentation. Once the beta is solid they start to migrate people. (With the recent Blog reader full interface change they even let people flip back to the old interface for a period of time as long as they gave feedback on why.)

All of that doesn't amount to being in a rushed state, running at 120%. But, if you ask anyone about productivity they will certainly be mentioned and there is absolutely no question they are successful.

This trend has been seen in other companies as well. Apple for some time has been viewed as a company that runs at full throttle and approaches things differently. Amazon for a long time held the distinction of being the "What if Amazon entered this market?"