Google’s Culture of Yes

June 23rd, 2008 by David Link

Recently, Eric Schmidt gave quite an inspirational speech at the Economic Club of Washington. It was so interesting; I wanted to share this with you in case you missed it. The entire speech is rather long but here’s the section on Google’s Culture of Yes.

After hearing his speech, I thought about how Eric and Google are impacting the digital revolution after so many others have tried unsuccessfully over the last 25 years. He has led the company through a period of explosive growth from $1 Billion to over $16 Billion in the past year, while keeping the young, fun, irreverent culture intact. Considering the meteoric rise of Google’s popularity in a reasonably short period of time, to the point that the company name is now actually a verb!

The point that I found enlightening was his summary, which you can scroll to at the 26 – 30 minutes timeframe in the presentation, where he shared an interesting glimpse into the culture of Google. “Creating more luck, giving yourself more at bats, being out there… to think big and inspire a culture of YES.” The culture of Yes inspires people to aim higher and be ambitious in their reach and goals.

That is a very interesting point in which I really believe. If there is one thing that all companies and especially small companies struggle with because of natural resource constraints, it is building a strong culture of Yes. We have tried to do this from the very inception of ScienceLogic, but it continues to get harder and harder the larger the business grows. To consistently inspire a principle of Yes, without agreeing to every idea that flows across my desk is amongst the most challenging parts of our daily jobs. However if I could create the perfect scenario, we would intuitively strive for a principle of Yes and inspire our associates and our ecosystem of partners and customers to use this simple concept to confidently go forward.

Eric says, “It is possible to build a culture around innovation. It is possible to build a culture around leadership, and it is possible to build a culture around optimism.” Google is a great example, but by no means the only example. I agree with Eric’s summary and hope to lead ScienceLogic according to these very basic but essential principles. “Let’s be revolutionaries. Let’s take this opportunity, this huge change that is before us with technology and let’s change our businesses, our communication and the way we interact on some new principles that reflect the very best in America.”

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