Google Case Memo - Culture at Google

Google Case Memo

1. Culture at Google

a. Diagnose the culture at Google.

From the material provided, I believe that Google has a very unique culture that can be thought of as a very strong customer-responsive culture. Their company motto is "Don't be Evil" which exemplifies their goal of developing products in the best interest of the customer. Although they deal with their customers in a virtual world, they have increased customer satisfaction through their innovations that are developed in order to improve the usefulness and efficiency of their products. Additionally, Google encourages innovation within its organization. Engineers are allowed to spend 20% of their time to work on "pet" projects, which has cultivated numerous projects. Some of the more successful projects include Google Earth, Gmail, and Google mobile which allows customers to get answers via text(Google gears down). Furthermore, this empowers the employees of Google to create and improve effective products that will increase the convenience and satisfaction customers will experience when using the internet. Google seeks to eliminate hierarchical structures by dividing employees into small teams that work on certain tasks. Also, Google offers employees with incredible perks that set them apart from other companies and increases job satisfaction and motivation within their employees. For example, there is free food, free fitness center, and a free doctor on site that the employees have access to. Google is very outcome oriented because they value creativity. Finally, Google's culture creates an environment that focuses on team orientation and growth along with eliminating competitiveness within the organization.

b. Diagnose and describe the possible subcultures that exist at Google.

Some of the possible subcultures that exist within Google are the Executive and engineer cultures. The executive culture is made up of the CEOs, vice presidents of different departments, and the subordinates. This group focuses on the financial survival and growth of the company. The engineer culture is a group that "represents the basic design elements of the technology underlying the work of the organization and has the knowledge of how that technology is to be utilized(Schein article, pg. 14)".

The engineer culture at Google consists of many employees working in small teams. Within these groups, the engineers are seeking to improve and create innovative products that will increase value for their customers. Schein argues that engineers try to achieve a ‘people-free' solution which is evident in the Google engineer culture. Google's engineers created a larger search engine that provided access to enormous amounts of information for customers which allows them to type in a search query and