Forbes.com goes inside Google's corporate structure and finds, not surprisingly, that it is not like other companies. CEO Eric Schmidt, who describes himself as the "adult supervision" at the
Googleplex, doesn't rule with the heavy, top-down mentality you might see at, say, Microsoft. Rather, the attitude in Mountain View, Calif. is more "swarm behavior" than "military rule," says Forbes.
Why? Because everyone at Google thinks they're smarter than everybody else. Anybody knows that Google, more than any other company in the world, is attracting the world's really, really smart people;
as one research director says, "We...only hire candidates who are above the mean of [our] current employees." In other words, people enter the company already thinking they're smarter than their boss,
so everyone feels like they have the right to do their own thing all the time. This means that the 70 percent of employee time Google touts as being devoted to its core areas isn't quite accurate.
Schmidt understands this, and he tries to strike a balance between interfering with playtime--getting the kids to do their chores--while acknowledging that playtime is innovation time, which could
always lead to the next bright discovery.
Read the whole story at Forbes.com »
