The Hsu’s Views

I ran across this in the May 2007 Wired magazine interview with Eric Schmidt. Toward the end of the interview he is asked, “Google’s revenue and employee head count have tripled in the last two years. How do you keep from becoming too bureaucratic or too chaotic?”

I was interested in this answer because the Wired Magazine editor asked the question with the assumption that Google should be run with a dynamic tension between bureaucratic and chaotic.

The reply:

It’s a constant problem. We analyze this every day, and our conclusion is that the best model is still small teams running as fast as they can and tolerating a certain lack of cohesion. Attempts to provide too much order dries out the creativity. What’s needed in a properly functioning corporation [or organism, movement] is a balance between creativity and order.

But we’ve reined in certain things. For example, we don’t tolerate the kind of “Hey, I want to have my own database and have a good time” behavior that was effective for us in the past.

I was struck by the notion of small team running fast, and the need to embrace a degree of incohesion, lest too much order would kill creativity. How do you think about a citywide movement of the body of Christ that would spur innovation toward transformation?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 8th, 2007 at 4:46 pm and is filed under Leadership, Movements, Organizational Theory, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.