The Google Way: A Book Review

Posted by tripwire45 on May 13, 2009 11:24 PM EDT
A Million Chimpanzees; By James Pyles 		Mail this story
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This is a very interesting read, but you may not know why you're reading it at first, or even exactly what you're reading. The title suggests that you'll learn the "Google way" of doing things and this is largely true. It also suggests that the "Google way" is a unique set of operations, philosophies, and processes that have resulted in Google's incredible success and that perhaps, by learning "the way", you may be able to replicate that success in your own efforts. Is that true? Probably not.

Whenever I hear a term such as "the Google way" or "the HP way" or "the giant-Fortune-500-megahuge-corporation way", I think of the mechanics a large company uses to operate on a day-to-day basis. My understanding of these "ways" is that they result in an evolutionary slowness in getting even the most simple and mundane tasks done (I once waited months to be hired for a temporary job at a very large corporation because all such temp hiring decisions had to flow through the CEO, which is madness, but it was their "way").



The general theme of this book, is to describe for the reader the origins of Google and how the development of the "Google way" resulted in it's tremendous success, including possible future directions for the search engine giant. To accomplish this, Girard pulls not just from all of the publicly available information on Google and its founders, but interviews with former Google staffers, general history, philosophy, and classic corporate strategies.

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