Google: Corporate Values

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The lifeblood of Google resides in its corporate values. The corporate values are “don’t be evil, technology matters, and we make our own rules ”These three values make Google stand out as an unconventional company who changed the way the search engine industry functioned.

The value “don’t be evil” is equivalent to Google’s strong belief in the ethical duty of a company. Other search engine sites give into temptation to sell out top ranked spots to advertisers of any kind which will skew the results the user is looking for. This defeats the point of a search engine and Google understands this. Google makes it clear that they will not accept advertisements pertaining to guns, hard liquor or other controversial advertisements. They want their search engine to be clean for users and fair to websites on the search engine that truly provide the most relevant results.

The second corporate value of Google is “we make our own rules.” When Google opened to the public it did not provide earnings guidance to wall street analysis. This is very different from other companies because most of them give estimates and figures regarding how the company will grow in the future and what revenues to expect. Google’s strategy was to make these figures a surprise and reduce speculation from Wall Street which could potentially ruin their company. When the company went public Google’s approach was to auction ipo shares rather then allocating shares to underwriters to sell. This was a more time consuming task for the company but created a demand for investors and an imagine of exclusivity for the company.

The last corporate value of Google is “technology matters.”  Google understands the heavy impact technology has on the Internet. A search engine should run at lightning fast speeds. While most companies were satisfied with their servers, Google went on a campaign to be the top of the industry. By 2007 Google was running about 1 million servers with hardware installed directly in the shipping containers. This reduced the cost of Google to spend time manually installing and more time to exponentially grow the processing power of the search engine. The servers were Linux-based and easy produced.

Google’s employees work style is unconventional compared to other companies. Engineers are google are encouraged to spend 20% of their time working on projects of their own and work in groups of three to five people.  Most companies are structured to tell employees what to work on and when to work on them. The flexibility Google gives to its employees is conducive to innovating thinking and inventing. This has brought success to Google by providing opportunities for many diverse products and programs and a sense of loyalty and importance for the employees. Schmid describes this work style with the quote “The result was a flexible organization with small teams pursuing hundreds of projects, an approach that “let a thousand flowers bloom.”