Thursday, May 14, 2009

The Google Way (Book)

James Pyles over at the Million Chimpanzees blog posted a review of the book “The Google Way: How One Company is Revolutionizing Management As We Know It”, by Bernard Girard:

Whenever I hear a term such as “the Google way” or “the HP way” or “the giant-Fortune-500-megahuge-corporation way”, I think of the mechanics a large company uses to operate on a day-to-day basis. My understanding of these “ways” is that they result in an evolutionary slowness in getting even the most simple and mundane tasks done (...)

The general theme of this book, is to describe for the reader the origins of Google and how the development of the “Google way” resulted in it’s tremendous success, including possible future directions for the search engine giant. To accomplish this, Girard pulls not just from all of the publicly available information on Google and its founders, but interviews with former Google staffers, general history, philosophy, and classic corporate strategies.

For instance, lessons learned by Ford’s revolutionary creation of the assembly line, creativity and Edison, and the invention of the steam engine, are all brought into play to illuminate the various concepts and methods of developing something that had never existed before.

Another recent book on Google with a focus on business is Jeff Jarvis’ “What Would Google Do?”. “Blog impresario Jarvis uses the company’s success to trace aspects of the new customer-driven, user-generated, niche-market-oriented, customized and collaborative world,” Publishers Weekly writes.

[Thanks Phil!]

The Google Way (Book) by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (1)

>> More posts

Advertisement