Some predict Google will quickly settle to avoid
discovery of more emails and postings, including from top management. What
seems worse, from a public-relations perspective, is a culture inveterately
hostile to the liberal principle “I may disagree with what you say but defend
your right to say it.” This can’t be good in a business whose mission is to
organize the world’s information. Messrs. Brin, Page and Pichai likely feel a
tad helpless. The U.S. legal system imposes a need to be race-aware,
gender-aware, etc.—to require quotas in all but name, since quotas are illegal.
Google simultaneously faces lawsuits and regulatory investigations directed at its
alleged shortchanging of women on pay and promotions. Its internal mood may
also partly be a victim of self-esteem run amok. It’s a wonder many Googlers
don’t worship Donald Trump —he also can’t tolerate to be disagreed with. A
good, old-fashioned Presbyterian horror of self-righteousness, once a feature
of American life, is nowhere to be seen. Part of growing up is learning to live
with your emotions; today’s shortcut is to believe whatever your feelings are,
they’re justified. Humanity never met a dictator or demagogue who said, “I’m a
bad person. I want to do bad things.” The worst among us always feel justified.
Google apparently suffers from a common ailment; Corporate
Culture. Companies get personalities and cultures as they mature. IBM had the
IBM salesman, the man in the single color suit with white shirt, simple tie and
a hat. You "trusted" this person to deliver your computer solution
for which you paid an enormous price. The Watsons had THINK signs everywhere
yet that oftentimes was the last thing an IBMer was expected to do. You were in
my experience and in my opinion expected to sell the company line and the
company products and services. Google started with "Don't be evil"[2].
They tried to position themselves as the good guys. Perhaps a result similar to
IBM. In fact the Code as referred by the Washington Post states:
“Employees of Alphabet and its subsidiaries and
controlled affiliates (‘Alphabet’) should do the right thing — follow the law,
act honorably, and treat each other with respect,” Alphabet’s code of conduct
reads. And: “We expect all of our employees and Board members to know and
follow this Code of Conduct. Failure to do so can result in disciplinary
action, including termination of employment. Any waivers of this Code for directors
or executive officers must be approved by our Board.”
Corporate culture evolves but it builds on the DNA of the
company from which it started. In the Google case they hired what they saw as
the "best" of the "best". The hired from a pool of
millennials who were already predispositioned to see themselves as
"special" and going to Google then made them the "most
special". They were paid handsomely but given where they lived the cost of
existence made the compensation modest at best. The best was some big win in a startup,
perhaps. Thus one gets a collection of company DNA from this select group of
"specials" along with the group think of a political mindset that as
"specials" everyone else was not just mundane but effectively
illiterate.
Moreover there were no role models. It was not like a
Lockheed Skunk Works where a new employee could look towards "Kelly"
Johnson as a role model. There was no hierarchy. The employees saw themselves
generating what they did as if they were the first and only people to have
conceived of and implemented what they produced. They were Googlers, like any
group of synchronized thinkers, they could see the world through their own
prism. Lacking "adult leadership", adults who themselves had
demonstrated creative competence as well as leadership, a culture evolved, a
culture more reflective of millennial values than any other.
Corporate culture is a critical element in the long term
success or failure of a company. That culture must support and nurture a
corporate identity to the outside, it must enable a trust in the company and
its offerings, it must embody the processes for a successful evolution of the
company. Corporate culture also evolves to meet the challenges of a changing
world and customer base. Failures of corporate cultures not so responding
litter the landscape. Take GE, a company bred in the industrial 19th
century, peaking in the mid to let 20th century and today appearing
as a corporate dinosaur with no identity. Its culture mired in the past. IBM is
a similar example, a company selling massively expensive almost one of a kind
systems with obscenely expensive "support" then moving into a
business based on consultancy and now attempting to market an erstwhile AI
talking box.
For Google, Facebook and the Silicon Valley crowd of fast
buck players, the time scales they may face are not a century long but more
likely decades or even less. In a high tech environment change can occur
suddenly. In the case of Google, their search engine is a valuable but fungible
asset, supported by the advertising linked to the searches. In addition, the
search engine provides massive marketing data which enhances the advertising
revenue source. Thus a simple feedback. As long as the user trusts Google, then
they, Google, will continue to have the "eyeballs" that can be
monetized, unless the advertisers find that there is some form of
disintermediation from a competing third party. Let me give an example. Half of
what I use Google for, or even substantially more, is searching for technical
papers. Semantic Scholar, one of Allen's entities, does a wonderful job. It is a
tool, a focused and valuable tool, currently devoid of advertising. Thus in
that past year my Google time has dropped dramatically. Take Facebook, I may
have been a early adopter but I was also an early leaver. Why? Simple, too many
people just saying stuff and linking me to it. I really did not want some
friend's friend bemoaning their love life or lost cat. In contrast Research
Gate is a vehicle to get my draft ideas out there, well more effective than
just a web site. Thus there is highly focused disintermediation already in
place.
How does corporate culture react to disintermediation? Let
not use the in term, "disrupter", a termed most likely coined in the
Valley. One does not disrupt, one gets in between, one can create and efficient
"appliance". Instead of having an all in one kitchen appliance, one
gets an attractive and highly effective "toaster" or "coffee
maker".
Corporate cultures evolve as we noted. But the process
whereby they are formed and then evolve is critical. The Google corporate
culture is interesting in that the company went from a small entity in the late
1990s to a massive institution in the current time. But it did so in an
environment for which there was no model to build on. Google type business did
not exist, it was being invented on the fly. Compare this to Amazon. Amazon
built a business where the difference was the introduction of an electronic
marketing and distribution channel. But a channel that was displacing a
physical one such as shopping malls. Thus it was well know what had to be done,
albeit now electronically. Thus the corporate culture of an Amazon was
delivering quality goods to the customer. Here we use quality as the amalgam of
value, that is competitive prices, and trust, which means if you don't like it
you can return it. That Amazon quality metric was what allowed it to work. It
was aided also by the degradation of physical shopping. In even the best
shopping malls the staff was rude, incompetent, low paid, and at best they were
there to catch a shoplifter not service the customer. Amazon was helped by the
degradation of customer service in what should have been their competition.
There are several questions worth examining:
1. How does one identify corporate culture? What are its
characteristics? What types of corporate culture are there?
All of these are characterization questions. It is almost
Aristotelian in nature to characterize or categorize culture in this manner[3].
The identification of a corporate culture is one thing and its categorization
is another. One may ask if a culture of Type A is of that type because of a set
of characteristics. What then are these characteristics.
2. What exogeneous factors form a corporate culture? Is it
the time, the place, the people, the business, the competition? Perhaps all of
these elements. Is there a west coast culture, versus say an east coast
culture?
It seems clear that Silicon Valley has its own culture.
However fifty years ago when it was all defense related the culture was
dramatically different. It was the same place but different work, workers, and of
course time. Is time the dominant factor or the change from Defense to
software. Even twenty five years ago it was more hard core technology. With
both hard core technology one had to have different corporate characteristics.
Technical people needed experience, competence, and coordination. RF
engineering for example was not easily learned and even less easily transformed
to embodiments. Customers were few, many Government entities so building
relationships was key. In a Google one could say they have no real nexus with
their customers, there are so many and each contributes a miniscule amount.
3. Who is the formative agent for a corporate culture? Is
the founder(s) the prime mover for culture? If not then is it from within or
from without?
In a company like Tesla one can see Musk as an influencer on
culture. In Apple it was Jobs, and unlikely Cook took his place. In Google?
Good question. It may briefly have been the founders, but they were very
technical and the investors brought in the "resident" adult as
Chairman but he was less a manager than a "front" for the marketing
of the company to investors. Currently Google has a CEO whose background
reflects a rather interesting mix, just what would require a detailed study.
But in Google as the WSJ article notes, the culture may be formed in a
different way, namely like that in Golding's book, Lord of the Flies. Let us
examine that for a moment.
In Lord of the Flies a group of young English school boys are
being evacuated during the war, not specified, and their escape aircraft crashes
and they end up on a island, with no other inhabitants. They are all young, all
somewhat privileged, and all lacking in any skills in terms of dealing with
groups. They are after all English school boys, public school boys. Two f them,
Ralph and Piggy find a conch, and then the tale takes off. It details how groups
and culture are formed, in this case a culture built on the Lord of the Flies,
a pseudonym for the Devil. Several of the young students are murdered at the
hands of the others, they do not fit within the "culture". The end of
the tale is the arrival of the adults, a Naval vessel to rescue the children.
The savages, as their culture has turned them into, somehow under an adult
revert to the school boys again. The Captain of the ship, now in control, looks
at his battered ship in a recognition that the adult culture has similar savage
behavior. New culture subsumed into old culture.
Now let us look at Golding and Lord of the Flies as a
possible paradigm for the Silicon Valley cultures. In a sense it is a paradigm
worth examining regarding corporate culture where the group is homogeneous,
lacking maturity, somewhat isolated, and totally unhinged from any underlying
ethical framework. Like Silicon Valley with tons of VC cash, lots of millennial
youngsters all told how smart they are. Success is not curing cancer, solving
poverty, or the like, success is achieving the most return in the shortest
period of time with the minimal amount of know how. Coders are the typists of
the 21st century. They do what they are told by the system
architects, albeit cleverly and efficiently, hopefully.
Where the true problem will arise, however, is in the
development of AI, where opinions which define the culture are made as part of
the IF, THEN, ELSE statements in the new AI culture. If one sees Lord of the
Flies in the Valley human culture, what then does one expect to see in this AI
culture. It must be remembered that humans both age and die off. Thus the
millennials are not here forever. Yet the AI bots and their off-spring may
readily carry forth this culture in those elements of the AI choices that are
made. We have people placing their judgements and values into AI statements. Do
we stop for the little puppy, or just run it over and crush it like Piggy!
Those value statements can become an integral part of the AI world. If we have
any concern about the people and their human culture and its values perhaps
then we should feel terrified about the AI culture they may leave behind!
Thus the question on the table is simple: is there a role
for Government in regards to these dominant players? Is Antitrust law
applicable? Some thirty years ago I studied in details the implications of
antitrust on the information industry at the time. I argued that information,
defined broadly, had the value in the food chain and little value was relegated
to actual transport no matter how it evolved. Earlier I had developed an
electronic marketing and distribution channel over CATV. Our model was more Ali
Baba than Amazon, or at least as Amazon was. Yet we integrated information with
transactions. It was a Google plus Amazon, thus its name; TIES or Transaction,
Information, Entertainment Services. Great idea just twenty to thirty years too
early! This teaches one that nothing is really new, just better timed.
[1] See
Wall Street Journal, https://www.wsj.com/articles/of-furries-and-fascism-at-google-1516144969
[2]
See Washington Post, October 5, 2016, Justin Moyer. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0ahUKEwiwt4LhzeHYAhVCja0KHchWDWMQFggpMAA&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com%2Fnews%2Fmorning-mix%2Fwp%2F2015%2F10%2F05%2Falphabet-now-googles-overlord-ditches-dont-be-evil-in-favor-of-do-the-right-thing%2F&usg=AOvVaw1m78ere68aA33GgbU3SO4u
[3]
Aristotle's Categories are: Substance, Quality, Quantity, Relation, Time,
Place, Position, Having, Action, And Passion. We could however take an
Ockhamist view and minimize these to two.
Posts
