google case study summary

Digital Marketing Strategy and Planning
Content Marketing
Digital Experience Management (Desktop/mobile website)
Email Marketing
Google Analytics
Marketing Campaign Planning
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Social Media Marketing
Agency growth
Business-to-Business
Charity and Not-for-profit
E-commerce / Retail
Managing Digital Teams
Managing Digital Branding
Managing Digital Transformation
Managing Lifecycle Marketing
Managing International Marketing
Startup and Small Businesses

Google case study

Google revenue model case study

Google case study : A summary of Google business strategy and background on Google technology for readers of my Digital Marketing and E-commerce books. End of case contains technical references on Google's approach to crawling, indexing and ranking results at the end of this case study page.

This Google strategy case study is updated for each new edition of my Digital marketing or E-business book.

Google mission

Google’s mission is encapsulated in the SEC filing statement:

“ to organize the world’s information …. and make it universally accessible and useful ”.

Google explains that it believes that the most effective, and ultimately the most profitable, way to accomplish our mission is to put the needs of our users first. Offering a high-quality user experience has led to strong word-of-mouth promotion and strong traffic growth.

Read further details on the culture and ethics of Google in their Ten Things Manifesto . Notable tenets of the Google philosophy are:

Focus on the user and all else will follow.
It's best to do one thing really, really well.
You can make money without doing evil (the founders are well known and chastised for making this statement).

Putting users first is reflected in three key commitments illustrated in the Google SEC filings: “1. We will do our best to provide the most relevant and useful search results possible, independent of financial incentives. Our search results will be objective and we will not accept payment for inclusion or ranking in them.

We will do our best to provide the most relevant and useful advertising. Advertisements should not be an annoying interruption. If any element on a search result page is influenced by payment to us, we will make it clear to our users.
We will never stop working to improve our user experience, our search technology and other important areas of information organization”.

In the Google Annual SEC filings (the best source of information on Google's strategy and value proposition), the company explains “ How We Provide Value to Our Users ”: “We serve our users by developing products that quickly and easily find, create, organize, and share information. We place a premium on products that matter to many people and have the potential to improve their lives”.

Some of the key benefits which are stressed are: Comprehensiveness and Relevance; Objectivity; Global Access; Ease of Use; Pertinent, Useful Commercial Information; Multiple Access Platforms and Improving the Web.

Google Revenue - summary of the 2011 split

Word Stream has taken the published figure and contributed this breakdown.

Source: WordStream

Google Services - 2010 update

The range of established Google services is well known. Many of these achieve through acquisition - see this 2010 summary of Google acquisitions

Google’s commitment to innovation is indicated by these more recent additions to their services which show that their ambitions extend far beyond search and information management through developing operating systems and hardware across multiple platforms to fulfill their mission “ to organize the world’s information …. and make it universally accessible and useful ”.

Google TV (Google TV (announced 2010) as part of a partnership agreement with Sony and other hardware vendors
Nexus One Phone using the Google Android mobile operating system launched in January 2010
Google Mobile advertising (although Google has offered text ads for some time, the 2009 acquisition of AdMob enables improvements in sophistication of this approach)
Google Chrome OS (a lightweight operating sysytem announced in 2009 and targeted initially at Netbooks)
Google Chrome (a browser announced as a beta in 2008 and a full product for Windows in 2009)
Google Apps Announced in 1997 when Google Apps Premier Edition became available for $50 per user account per year, and includes phone support, additional storage, and a new set of administration and business integration capabilities.

Google strategy presentations

The latest announcements of Google strategy are available from Google podium

You can get the latest company announcement through the Google SEC filings

This is a useful 2008 summary of Google's strategy from a French consulting company:

Previous Case study updates

Google Founders letter - Published May 2009 - this note from the founders of Google outlines future strategy and priorities in key Google services.
Number of Google advertisers - currently 1.3 to 1.5 million indicating plenty of potential for growth. See analysis on Number of Google advertisers

Update - trends in usage of Google services

TechCruch has a useful summary of US trends in usage of Google services . This catalogues the continued growth of Google in the US in its core services, but shows Google Video, Scholar and Google Product Search falling substantially.

Click on the top left link on the Widget below to see Tech Crunches take on Google's product strategy:

Proposition - See Guidelines from Google on the principles used to determine their customer experience of Google and applications like Gmail and Google Docs

Google case study - reports

The best available case study is from the most recent Google Annual Report SEC filing which gives all the Google financial and its success and risk factors. Choose the annual report.

SEC is the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) which is a government agency for which companies like Google have to submit an open evaluation of their business models and marketplace conditions.

One of the best inside indications on the issues that Google faces as a business is this Search Engine Strategies interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt .

This covers many of the challenges that Google faces:

User data Privacy
Ad revenue models
New ad formats (Video and Click Per Call)
Personalisation of search

Google revenue model

In 2009 Google generated approximately 97% of its revenues (99% in 2008 and 2009). from its advertisers with the remainder from its enterprise search products where companies can install search technology through products such as the Google Appliance and Google Mini.

Latest business performance results - Google Q4 2009 performance

The extract below is taken from the press release update I receive via the Google Investors relation blog - you will be able to get the latest there.

the continued importance of revenues from ads on third party ads (31%) using the AdSense programme (like ads on my site)
the surprising volume of revenue from US (c50%) given that Google is a global company
low cost base - mainly from operating datacentres, payroll and employee stock options

Google Q4 Financial Highlights

Revenues - Google reported revenues of $6.67 billion in the fourth quarter of 2009, representing a 17% increase over fourth quarter 2008 revenues of $5.70 billion. Google reports its revenues, consistent with GAAP, on a gross basis without deducting TAC.
Google Sites Revenues - Google-owned sites generated revenues of $4.42 billion, or 66% of total revenues, in the fourth quarter of 2009. This represents a 16% increase over fourth quarter 2008 revenues of $3.81 billion.
Google Network Revenues - Google's partner sites generated revenues, through AdSense programs, of $2.04 billion, or 31% of total revenues, in the fourth quarter of 2009. This represents a 21% increase from fourth quarter 2008 network revenues of $1.69 billion.
International Revenues - Revenues from outside of the United States totaled $3.52 billion, representing 53% of total revenues in the fourth quarter of 2009, compared to 53% in the third quarter of 2009 and 50% in the fourth quarter of 2008. Excluding gains related to our foreign exchange risk management program, had foreign exchange rates remained constant from the third quarter of 2009 through the fourth quarter of 2009, our revenues in the fourth quarter of 2009 would have been $112 million lower. Excluding gains related to our foreign exchange risk management program, had foreign exchange rates remained constant from the fourth quarter of 2008 through the fourth quarter of 2009, our revenues in the fourth quarter of 2009 would have been $196 million lower.
Revenues from the United Kingdom totaled $772 million, representing 12% of revenues in the fourth quarter of 2009, compared to 12% in the fourth quarter of 2008. In the fourth quarter of 2009, we recognized a benefit of $8 million to revenues through our foreign exchange risk management program, compared to $129 million in the fourth quarter of 2008.
Paid Clicks - Aggregate paid clicks, which include clicks related to ads served on Google sites and the sites of our AdSense partners, increased approximately 13% over the fourth quarter of 2008 and increased approximately 9% over the third quarter of 2009.
Cost-Per-Click - Average cost-per-click, which includes clicks related to ads served on Google sites and the sites of our AdSense partners, increased approximately 5% over the fourth quarter of 2008 and increased approximately 2% over the third quarter of 2009.
TAC - Traffic Acquisition Costs, the portion of revenues shared with Google's partners, increased to $1.72 billion in the fourth quarter of 2009, compared to TAC of $1.48 billion in the fourth quarter of 2008. TAC as a percentage of advertising revenues was 27% in the fourth quarter of 2009, compared to 27% in the fourth quarter of 2008.

The majority of TAC is related to amounts ultimately paid to our AdSense partners, which totaled $1.47 billion in the fourth quarter of 2009. TAC also includes amounts ultimately paid to certain distribution partners and others who direct traffic to our website, which totaled $250 million in the fourth quarter of 2009.

Other Cost of Revenues - Other cost of revenues, which is comprised primarily of data center operational expenses, amortization of intangible assets, content acquisition costs as well as credit card processing charges, decreased to $688 million, or 10% of revenues, in the fourth quarter of 2009, compared to $707 million, or 12% of revenues, in the fourth quarter of 2008.
Operating Expenses - Operating expenses, other than cost of revenues, were $1.78 billion in the fourth quarter of 2009, or 27% of revenues, compared to $1.65 billion in the fourth quarter of 2008, or 29% of revenues.

Google technical architecture

Google has been relatively open about how it works and its architecture. These are some of the key documents explaining the Google architecture.

Original paper by Sergey and Brin . Covers approach to crawling, indexing and ranking. See analysis of latest Google patents .
Introduction to query and ranking process . This is an introduction for webmasters.
Google technical architecture overview . This has further details on the process of performing a search and looks at the hardware architecture also.
Google Server details - pictures of the servers Google uses to power its system.

Here is a little more detail on the process shown in the figure at the top of the page. In 2010 Google introduced these How Google Works Videos which are recommended reading/watching.

1. Crawling

The purpose of the crawl is to identify relevant pages for indexing and assess whether they have changed. Crawling is performed by robots aka spiders or bots which visit web pages and retrieve a reference URL of the page for later analysis and indexing.

Although the terms “bot” and “spider” give the impression of something physical is visiting a site, the reality is that the bots are simply software processes running on a search engine’s server which request pages, follow the links contained on that page and so create a series of page references with associated URLs. This is a recursive process, so each link followed will find additional links which then need to be crawled. Google uses many computers running many distributed processes for crawling.

Each robot leaves a signature in the web server log file of the site it visits with a unique user agent string such as “Googlebot/2.1”. SEOs can use this signature to assess whether or how frequently a page is being crawled by different robots. The SEO Ranking Success Box ‘Evaluate robot crawling’ gives examples of the main user agent strings and discusses this in more detail. It also shows how you can use Google Webmaster Tools to see the number of pages Googlebot is crawling each day.

2. Indexing.

An index is created to enable the search engine to rapidly find the most relevant pages containing the query typed by the searcher. Rather than searching each page for a query phrase, a search engine “inverts” the index to produce a lookup table (in information retrieval terminology a “posting list”) of the documents containing particular words. For example for the search ‘online marketing’ the search engine might find the word online in documents 12, 23, 48, 57 and 94 and the word marketing in documents 12, 23, 48 and 57 as follows:

Table Volume of searches for single keywords in a single month

Online 12 23 57 94 marketing 23 48 57 Both words 23 57

The query of the index for a phrase uses the intersection between different postings lists for different words. The index is distributed across many servers to make lookup more efficient. Google estimates that for each search that someone types in, over 500 servers may work together to find the best documents.

In early search engines, the index information would be limited to a simple lookup table of words against dcuments, but today, many other aspects characterising a page will be stored in the index files for example a document’s its title, meta description, PageRank, trust or authority, spam rating, etc will be referenced. For the words in the document additional attributes will be stored such as semantic markup (H1, H2, etc), occurrence in anchor text, position in document, etc.

3. Ranking or scoring.

The indexing process has produced a lookup of all the pages that contain particular words in a query, but they are not sorted in terms of relevance. Ranking of the document to assess the most relevant set of documents to return in the SERPs occurs in real time for the search query entered. First, relevant documents will be retrieved from a runtime version of the index at a particular data centre, then a rank for each document will be computed based on many ranking factors. A relatively recent description of the technology approach

Evaluation of relevance is based on the many positive indications of relevance contained in this report of which the most important are:

PageRank – the number of links from other pages.
Authority and trust of the pages which refer to a page
The number of times the words, phrases and synonyms occur on the pgage
The occurrence of the phrase within the document meta data including its title and meta tags.

There are also negative indications of quality which may indicate attempts at SPAM such as including hidden text on a page, repeating a keyphrase within the document or title, lack of real content.

4. Query request and results serving.

The familiar search engine interface accepts the searchers query. The users location is assessed through their IP address and the query is then passed to a relevant data centre for processing. The process described in the section on ranking occurs in real-time to return a sorted list of relevant documents and these are then displayed on the Search Results Page. Increasingly, results from other index servers return other types of information from vertical search engines. Google refers to this approach as Google Universal Search.

By Dave Chaffey

Digital strategist Dr Dave Chaffey is co-founder and Content Director of online marketing training platform and publisher Smart Insights. 'Dr Dave' is known for his strategic, but practical, data-driven advice. He has trained and consulted with many business of all sizes in most sectors. These include large international B2B and B2C brands including 3M, BP, Barclaycard, Dell, Confused.com, HSBC, Mercedes-Benz, Microsoft, M&G Investment, Rentokil Initial, O2, Royal Canin (Mars Group) plus many smaller businesses. Dave is editor of the templates, guides and courses in our digital marketing resource library used by our Business members to plan, manage and optimize their marketing. Free members can access our free sample templates here . Dave is also keynote speaker, trainer and consultant who is author of 5 bestselling books on digital marketing including Digital Marketing Excellence and Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice . In 2004 he was recognised by the Chartered Institute of Marketing as one of 50 marketing ‘gurus’ worldwide who have helped shape the future of marketing. My personal site, DaveChaffey.com, lists my latest Digital marketing and E-commerce books and support materials including a digital marketing glossary . Please connect on LinkedIn to receive updates or ask me a question .

Turbocharge your results with this toolkit containing 11 resources

Digital marketing models guide
Digital marketing strategy guide
Digital marketing plan workbook
View the Toolkit

The Digital Marketing Strategy And Planning toolkit contains:

FREE marketing planning templates

Start your Digital Marketing Plan today with our Free membership.

FREE practical guides to review your approach
FREE digital marketing plan templates
FREE alerts on the latest developments

Solutions to your marketing challenges

Digital Transformation
Email Marketing and Marketing Automation
Managing Digital Marketing Teams
Marketing Strategy and Planning
Multichannel lifecycle marketing

Expert advice by sector

Business-to-Business (B2B)
Charity and Not-For-Profit
E-commerce and Retail
Sector Technology Innovation
Startups and Small Businesses

Improve your digital marketing skills with our FREE guides and templates

Join the Conversation

Three digital marketing plan examples

From B2B to E-commerce to Brands, we’ve got examples of digital marketing plans for early startups through to multinational enterprises Whether you’re starting from scratch, or improving your existing plans, examples of digital marketing plans help marketers see the how, …..

10 Actionable Digital Marketing Trends for 2025

Dr Dave Chaffey’s practical review of the marketing trends that will matter for B2C and B2B marketers in 2025 I’ve been writing reviews of the latest digital marketing innovations for well over 10 years now; spurred on since they seem …..

Digital marketing strategy and planning template. 2024 edition.

Use our digital marketing strategy template integrated across the RACE Framework to plan and get ahead in your digital marketing We all know the old saying “if you fail to plan, you are planning to fail”, but when it comes …..

Original Article
Open access
Published: 19 December 2017

GOOGLE: a reflection of culture, leader, and management

Sang Kim Tran 1 , 2

International Journal of Corporate Social Responsibility volume 2 , Article number: 10 ( 2017 ) Cite this article

435k Accesses

4 Altmetric

Metrics details

This paper provides a viewpoint of the culture and subcultures at Google Inc., which is a famous global company, and has a huge engineering staff and many talented leaders. Through its history of development, it has had positive impacts on society; however; there have been management challenges. The Board of Directors (BoDs) developed and implemented a way to measure the abilities of their managers, which helped to identify problems. This paper will analyze the case study of Harvard Business Review, Oxygen Project, and clarify the management problem in Google’s organization. It will also compare Google with Zappos, a much smaller organization, and present how the BoDs of Zappos assesses its culture and subcultures. In this paper, we will recommend eight important points to building an organizational culture that is positive for stable growth of a company. We believe that much of what be learned could be useful to other business leaders, regardless of company scale.

Introduction

In a large society, each company is considered a miniature society (Mawere 2011 ). Similar to large societies with large cultures, small societies also need to build their own cultures. A culture is influenced by many factors and determines if it is a great culture. Corporate culture requires both the attention to the efficiency of production and business and to the relationship among people in the organization closely (Bhagat et al. 2012 ). Regardless if it is a large or a small organization, it must encounter issues of cooperation among individuals and groups. There are many factors leading to the success of business process re-engineering in higher education (BPR), the main four elements are culture, processes, structure, and technology. Culture is listed as number one (Ahmad et al. 2007 ). Hence, culture becomes the most important factor to the success of the development of a business. Organizational culture is the set of shared beliefs (Steiber and Alänge 2016 ), values, and norms that influence the way members think, feel, and behave. Culture is created by means of terminal and instrumental values, heroes, rites and rituals, and communication networks (Barman n.d. ). The primary methods of maintaining organizational culture are through the socialization process by which an individual learns the values, expected behaviors, and necessary social knowledge to assume their roles in the organization. In addition, (Gupta and Govindarajan 2000 ) and Fig. 1 in (Ismail Al-Alawi et al. 2007 ) illustrates that culture was established by six major factors, such as information systems, people, process, leadership, rewarding system, and organization structure. Therefore, there is a wide variety of combined and sophisticated cultures in the workplace, especially in big corporations like Google, Facebook, Proctor & Gamble, etc. Each organization tends to have a common goal, which is to create a culture that is different from other companies and to promote their teams to be creative in developing a distinctive culture (Stimpson and Farquharson 2014 ). Clearly, we can see that Google’s culture is different than others. What makes this company unique and different from others, as well as the dominant cultures and subcultures existing at this company? How do leadership behaviors impact the organizational culture? By operating a case study of a Harvard Business Review to analyze its organizational culture, subsequently, having compared it with Zappos’ culture, this paper will clarify the similarities and differences in managing organizational cultures between them and consider whether the solutions for the problems can be applied to other business models, and for tomorrow leaders or not?

Trends of using product by information searching

Company overview

This part shows how Google became famous in the world and its culture and subcultures made it a special case for others to take into consideration. Google is one of the few technology companies which continue to have one of the fastest growth rates in the world. It began by creating a search engine that combined PageRank system, developed by Larry Page (ranking the importance of websites based on external links), and Web search engine, created by Sergey Brin (accessing a website and recording its content), two co-founders of the company (Jarvis 2011 ; Downes 2007 ). Google’s achievements absolutely do not come from any luck. Google has made extra efforts in creating an index of a number of websites, which have been up to 25 billion websites. This also includes 17 million images and one billion messages to Usenet group (Downes 2007 ). Besides searching for websites, Google users are able to search for PDF files, PostScript, documents, as well as Microsoft, Lotus, PowerPoint and Shockwave files. Google processes nearly 50% of search queries all over the world. Moreover, it is the number one search option for web users and is one of the top five websites on the Internet, which have more than 380 million users and 28 billion visits every month, and more than 50% of access from countries outside the US (Desjardins 2017 ). Google’s technology is rather special: it can analyze millions of different variables of users and businesses who place advertisements. It then connects them with millions of potential advertisements and gives messages of advertisement, which is closest to objects in less than one second. Thus, Google has the higher rate of users clicking advertisements than its opponent Yahoo, from 50 to 100%, and it dominates over 70% market share of paid advertisements (Rosenberg 2016 ). Google’s self-stated mission: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful (Alves n.d. ).” Nowadays, it is believed that people in the world like “Google” with words “the useful-lively information storage”.

Predominant culture at Google

The dominant culture in the organization depends on the environment in which the company operates the organization’s objectives, the belief system of the employees, and the company’s management style. Therefore, there are many organizational cultures (Schein 2017 ). The Exhibit 3.1 at page 39 in (Schein 2009 ) provides what culture is about. For example, employee follows a standard procedure with a strict adherence to hierarchy and well-defined individual roles and responsibilities. Those in competitive environments, such as sales may forget strict hierarchies and follow a competitive culture where the focus is on maintaining strong relationships with external parties. In this instance, the strategy is to attain competitive advantages over the competition. The collaborative culture is yet another organizational way of life. This culture presents a decentralized workforce with integrated units working together to find solutions to problems or failure.

Why do many large companies buy its innovation? Because its dominant culture of 99% defect-free operational excellence squashes any attempts at innovation, just like a Sumo wrestler sitting on a small gymnast (Grossman-Kahn and Rosensweig 2012 ). They cannot accept failures. In fact, failure is a necessary part of innovation and Google took this change by Oxygen Project to measure the abilities of their multicultural managers. This means that Google itself possesses multiple different cultures (see Google’s clips). Like Zappos, Google had established a common, organizational culture for the whole offices that are distinctive from the others. The predominant culture aimed at Google is an open culture, where everybody and customer can freely contribute their ideas and opinions to create more comfortable and friendly working environment (Hsieh 2010a ).

The fig. 2 .1 in chapter two of (Schein 2009 ) and page 17 in part one of (Schein 2017 ) provide us three levels of culture which are Artifacts, Espoused values and Underlying assumptions helping us to understand the culture at Google. At page 84, in (Schein 2009 ), the “artifacts” are identified such as dress codes, level of formality in authority relationships, working hours, meeting (how often, how run, timing), how are decisions made, communication, social events, jargon, uniforms, identity symbols, rites and rituals, disagreements and conflicts, balance between work and family . It seems that Google is quite open in these artifacts by showing a respect for uniform and national culture of each staff individually and giving them the right to wear traditional clothes.

Ad Blocking Incidence

Working at Google, employees enjoy free food served throughout the day, a volleyball court, a swimming pool, a car wash, an oil change, a haircut, free health care, and many other benefits. The biggest benefit for the staff is to be picked up on the day of work. As assessed by many traffic experts, the system set up by Google is considered to be a great transport network. Tad Widby, a project manager and a traffic system researcher throughout the United States, said: “I have not seen any larger projects in the Bay Area as well as in urban areas across the country” (Helft 2007 ). Of course, it is impossible for Google to “cover up the sky”, so Yahoo also started implementing the bus project for employees in 2005. On peak days, Yahoo’s bus also took off. Pick up about 350 employees in San Francisco, as well as Berkeley, Oakland, etc. These buses run on biofuels and have Wi-Fi coverage. Yet, Danielle Bricker, the Yahoo bus coordinator of Yahoo, has also admitted that the program is “indirectly” inspired by Google’s initiative (Helft 2007 ). Along with that, eBay recently also piloted shuttle bus transfers at five points in San Francisco. Some other corporations are also emerging ideas for treatment of staff is equally unique. Facebook is an example, instead of facilitating employees far from the workplace; it helps people in the immediate neighborhood by offering an additional $10,000 for an employee to live close to the pillar within 10 miles, nearby the Palo Alto Department (Hall 2015 ).

When it comes to Google, people often ask what the formula for success is. The answer here is the employees of Google. They create their own unique workplace culture rules to create an effective work environment for their employees. And here are the most valuable things to learn from Google’s corporate culture (Scott 2008 ) that we should know:

Tolerate with mistakes and help staff correct

At Google, paying attention to how employees work and helping them correct mistakes is critical. Instead of pointing out the damage and blaming a person who caused the mistake, the company would be interested in what the cause of the problem was and how to fix it as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Also as its culture, we understand that if we want to make breakthroughs in the workplace, we need to have experimentation, failure and repeat the test. Therefore, mistakes and failures are not terrible there. We have the right to be wrong and have the opportunity to overcome failure in the support of our superiors and colleagues. Good ideas are always encouraged at Google. However, before it is accepted and put into use, there is a clear procedure to confirm whether it is a real new idea and practical or not?

Exponential thought

Google developed in the direction of a holding company - a company that does not directly produce products or provide services but simply invest in capital by buying back capital. In the company, the criteria for setting the ten exponential function in lieu of focusing only on the change in the general increase. This approach helps Google improve its technology and deliver great products to consumers continuously.

Of course, every company wants to hire talented people to work for them. However, being talented is an art in which there must be voluntary work and enthusiasm for the work of the devotees. At page 555 in (Saffold 1988 ) illustrated that distinctive cultures dramatically influencing performance do exist. Likewise, Google, Apple, Netflix, and Dell are 40% more productive than the average company which attracts top-tier employees and high performers (Vozza 2017 ). Recognizing this impact, Google created a distinctive corporate culture when the company attracted people from prestigious colleges around the world (West 2016 ; Lazear and Gibbs 2014 ).

Build a stimulating work environment

When it comes to the elements that create creativity and innovation, we can easily recognize that the working environment is one of the most important things. Google has succeeded in building an image of a creative working. Google offices are individually designed, not duplicated in any type of office. In fact, working environment at Google is so comfortable so that employees will not think of it as a working room, with a full area of work, relaxation, exercise, reading, watching movies. Is the orientation of Google’s corporate culture to stimulate creativity and to show interest in the lives of employees so that volunteers contribute freely (Battelle 2011 )?

Subculture is also a culture, but for a smaller group or community in a big organization (Crosset and Beal 1997 ). Google, known as the global company with many more offices, so there are many subcultures created among groups of people who work together, from subcultures among work groups to subcultures among ethnic groups and nations, multi-national groups, as well as multiple occupations, functions, geographies, echelons in the hierarchy and product lines. For example, six years ago, when it bought 100 Huffys for employees to use around the sprawling campus, has since exploded into its own subculture. Google now has a seven-person staff of bicycle mechanics that maintains a fleet of about 1300 brightly-colored Google bikes. The company also encourages employees to cycle to work by providing locker rooms, showers and places to securely park bikes during working hours. And, for those who want to combine meetings with bike-riding, Googlers can use one of several seven-person (Crowley 2013 ).

Leadership influences on the culture at Google

From the definition of leadership and its influence on culture; so what does leader directly influence the culture existed? According to Schein, “culture and leadership are two sides of the same coin and one cannot understand one without the other”, page three in (Schein 2009 ). If one of us has never read the article “Google and the Quest to create a better boss” in the New York Times, it is listed in a priority reading. It breaks the notion that managers have no change. The manager really makes a difference (Axinn 1988 ; Carver 2011 ). In fact, a leader has a massive impact on the culture of the company, and Google is not an exception. The leaders of Google concerned more about the demands and abilities of each individual, the study of the nature of human being, an appreciation their employees as their customers. At Google, the founders thought they could create a company that people would want to work at when creating a home-like environment. It is real that they focus on the workplace brings the comfort to staff creatively and freely (Lebowitz 2013 ).

In my opinion, a successful business cannot be attributed solely from a single star; that needs the brightness of all employees. It depends very much on the capacity and ability to attract talented people. It is the way in which the leader manages these talents, is the cornerstone of corporate culture. One thing that no one can deny is that a good leader must be a creator of a corporate culture so that the employees can maximize capabilities themselves (Driscoll and McKee 2007 ; Kotter 2008 ).

To brief, through the view of Google’s culture, BoDs tended and designed to encourage loyalty and creativity, based on an unusual organizational culture because culture is not only able to create an environment, but it also adapts to diverse and changes circumstances (Bulygo 2013 ).

Company growth and its impact

“Rearrange information around the world, make them accessible everywhere and be useful.” This was one of the main purposes set by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they first launched Google on September 4th, 1998, as a private company (Schmidt and Rosenberg 2014 ). Since then, Google has expanded its reach, stepped into the mobile operating system, provided mapping services and cloud computing applications, launched its own hardware, and prepared it to enter the wearable device market. However, no matter how varied and rich these products are, they are all about the one thing, the root of Google: online searching.

1998–2001: Focus on search

In its early years, Google.com was simply one with extreme iconic images: a colorful Google logo, a long text box in the middle of the screen, a button to execute. One button for searching and the other button are “I’m feeling lucky” to lead users to a random Google site. By May 2000, Google added ten additional languages to Google.com , including French, German, Italian, Swedish, Finnish, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Norwegian and Danish, etc. This is one of the milestones in Google’s journey into the world. Google.com is available in over 150 languages (Scott 2008 ; Lee 2017 ).

2001–2007: Interface card

A very important event with Google around this time was the sale of shares to the public (IPO). In October 2003, Microsoft heard news of the IPO, so it quickly approached Google to discuss a buyout or business deal. Nevertheless, that intention was not materialized. In 2004, it was also the time when Google held a market share of 84.7% globally through collaboration with major Internet companies, such as Yahoo, AOL, and CNN. By February 2004, Yahoo stopped working with Google and separately stood out for engine search. This has led Google to lose some market share, but it has shown the importance and distinctness of Google. Nowadays, the term “Google” has been used as a verb just by visiting Google.com and doing an online search (Smith 2010 ). Not stopping at the homepage search, Google’s interface tag began to be brought to Gmail and Calendar with the links at the top of the page. Google homepage itself continues to use this style.

In 2006, Google also made an important acquisition to buy YouTube for $1.65 billion (Burgess and Green 2013 ). However, the company decided to keep YouTube as a separate brand and not to include it in Google Video search. Thanks to the backing of an Internet industry giant, YouTube has grown to become the world’s largest online video sharing service (Cha et al. 2007 ).

2007–2012: Navigation bar, Google menu, Google now

Google began to deploy a new navigation bar located at the edge of the screen. It includes links to a place where to look for photos, videos, news, maps, as well as buttons to switch to Gmail, Calendar, and other services developed by the company. In the upper left corner, Google added a box displaying Google + notifications and user accounts’ image. Google Now not only appeared on Android and it’s also brought to Chrome on a computer as well as iOS. All have the same operating principle, and the interface card still appears as Android it is.

2013–2014: Simplified interface

Google has moved all of the icons that lead to its other applications and services to an App Drawer button in the upper right hand, at the corner of the screen. In addition, Google.com also supports better voice search through the Chrome browser. Google has experimented with other markets, such as radio and print publications, and in selling advertisements from its advertisers within offline newspapers and magazines. As of November 2014, Google operates over 70 offices over 40 countries (Jarvis 2011 ; Vise 2007 ).

2014–2017: Chrome development and facing challenges

In 2015, Google would turn HTTPS into the default. The better website is, the more users will trust search engine. In 2016, Google announced Android version 7, introduced a new VR platform called Daydream, and its new virtual assistant, Google Assistant.

Most of Google’s revenue comes from advertising (Rosenberg 2016 ). However, this “golden” business is entering a difficult period with many warning signs of its future. Google Search is the dominant strength of Google and bringing great revenue for the company. Nonetheless, when Amazon surpassed Google to become the world’s leading product in the search engine in last December, this advantage began to wobble. This is considered a fatal blow to Google when iOS devices account for 75% of their mobile advertising revenue (Rosenberg 2016 ).

By 2016, the number of people installing software to block ads on phones has increased 102% from 2015. Figure 1 illustrates that by the year’s end, about 16% of smart phone users around the world blocked their ads whilst surfing the web. These were also two groups having the most time on the Internet, high-earners and young people; however, these people have disliked ads (see Fig. 1 ).

Figure 2 shows the young people have the highest ad blocking rates. It is drawing a gloomy picture for the sustainable development of the online advertising industry in general and Google in particular. Therefore, in early 2017, Google has strategies to build an ad blocking tool, built into the Chrome browser. This tool allows users to access ads that have passed the “Coalition for Better Ads” filter so as to limit the sense of discomfort (see Fig. 2 ).

For the company impact, the history shows that speedy development of Google creates both economic and social impacts to followers in a new way of people connection (Savitz 2013 ). In this modern world, it seems that people cannot spend a day without searching any information in Google (Chen et al. 2014 ; Fast and Campbell 2004 ), a tool serves human information seeking needs. Even though when addressing this paper, it is also in need the information from Google search and uses it as a supporting tool. Nobody can deny the convenience of Google as a fast and easy way to search (Schalkwyk et al. 2010 ; Jones 2001 ; Langville and Meyer 2011 ).

Research question and methodology

In order to get the most comprehensive data and information for this case analysis, a number of methods are used, including:

Research data and collect information were mostly from the Harvard Study (Project Oxygen), which has been selected because it is related to the purpose of our study.

Data collection and analysis has been taken from Google Scholar and various websites related researches. We look at the history of appearance, development, and recognize the impacts of this company, as well as the challenges and the way the Board of Directors measures the abilities of their manager when the problem is found.

Analyzing: It was begun by considering expectations from the Harvard Study. Subsequently, considering the smaller organization (Zappos) in comparison of how its cultures and subcultures are accessed as well. Since then, the paper has clarified the management problem that Google and Zappos confront and deal with it so as to help other businesses apply this theoretical practice and achieve its goal beyond expectations.

In our paper, we mainly use the inductive method approach by compiling and describing the other authors’ theories of corporate culture, especially Google and Zappos in merging and comparing, analyzing them and making our own results.

From the aspects of the research, the questions are suggested as below:

What is the most instrumental element found from the Harvard study?

Is there any difference and similarity between a huge company and a smaller enterprise in perspective of culture and subculture?

What makes Google different from others, the dominant cultures as well as subcultures existing? How do leadership behaviors impact on the organizational culture?

How organizational culture impacts on business achievements?

The Harvard study

Project oxygen summary.

This project began in 2009 known as “the manager project” with the People and Innovation Lab (PiLab) team researching questions, which helped the employee of Google become a better manager. The case study was conducted by Garvin (2013) about a behavior measurement to Google’s manager, why managers matter and what the best manager s do. In early days of Google, there are not many managers. In a flat structure, most employees are engineers and technical experts. In fact, in 2002 a few hundred engineers reported to only four managers. But over time and out of necessity, the number of managers increased. Then, in 2009, people and team culture at Google noticed a disturbing trend. Exit interview data cited low satisfaction with their manager as a reason for leaving Google. Because Google has accessed so much online data, Google’s statisticians are asked to analyze and identify the top attributes of a good manager mentioned with an unsolved question: “Do managers matter?” It always concerns all stakeholders at Google and requires a data-based survey project called Project Oxygen to clarify employees’ concern, to measure key management behaviors and cultivate staff through communication and training (Bryant 2011 ; Garvin et al. 2013 ). Research −1 Exit Interviews, ratings, and semiannual reviews. The purpose is to identify high-scoring managers and low-scoring managers resulted in the former, less turnover on their teams, and its connection (manager quality and employee’s happiness). As for “what the best managers do”, Research-2 is to interview high and low scoring managers and to review their performance. The findings with 8 key behaviors illustrated by the most effective managers.

The Oxygen Project mirrors the managers’ decision-making criteria, respects their needs for rigorous analysis, and makes it a priority to measure impact. In the case study, the findings prove that managers really have mattered. Google, initially, must figure out what the best manager is by asking high and low scoring managers such questions about communication, vision, etc. Its project identifies eight behaviors (Bulygo 2013 ; Garvin et al. 2013 ) of a good manager that considered as quite simple that the best manager at Google should have. In a case of management problem and solution, as well as discussing four- key theoretical concepts, they will be analyzed, including formal organizational training system, how culture influences behavior, the role of “flow” and building capacity for innovation, and the role of a leader and its difference from the manager.

Formal organizational training system to create a different culture: Ethical culture

If the organizational culture represents “how we do things around here,” the ethical culture represents “how we do things around here in relation to ethics and ethical behavior in the organization” (Key 1999 ). Alison Taylor (The Five Levels of an Ethical Culture, 2017) reported five levels of an ethical culture, from an individual, interpersonal, group, intergroup to inter-organizational (Taylor 2017 ). In (Nelson and Treviño 2004 ), ethical culture should be thought of in terms of a multi-system framework included formal and informal systems, which must be aligned to support ethical judgment and action. Leadership is essential to driving the ethical culture from a formal and informal perspective (Schwartz 2013 ; Trevino and Nelson 2011 ). Formally, a leader provides the resources to implement structures and programs that support ethics. More informally, through their own behaviors, leadership is a role model whose actions speak louder than their words, conveying “how we do things around here.” Other formal systems include selection systems, policies and codes, orientation and training programs, performance management systems, authority structures, and formal decision processes. On the informal side are the organization’s role models and heroes, the norms of daily behavior, organizational rituals that support or do not support ethical conduct, the stories people tell about the organization and their implications for conduct, and the language people use, etc. Is it okay to talk about ethics? Or is ethical fading the norm?

The formal and informal training is very important. The ethical context in organizations helps the organizational culture have a tendency to the positive or negative viewpoints (Treviño et al. 1998 ). The leader should focus on providing an understanding of the nature and reasons for the organization’s values and rules, on providing an opportunity for question and challenge values for sincerity/practicality, and on teaching ethical decision-making skills related to encountered issues commonly. The more specific and customized training, the more effective it is likely to be. Google seemed to apply this theory when addressed the Oxygen Project.

How culture influences behavior

Whenever we approach a new organization, there is no doubt that we will try to get more about the culture of that place, the way of thinking, working, as well as behavior. And it is likely that the more diverse culture of a place is, the more difficult for outsiders to assess its culture becomes (Mosakowski 2004 ).

Realizing culture in (Schein 2009 ) including artifacts, espoused valued and shared underlying assumptions. It is easier for outsiders to see the artifacts (visual objects) that a group uses as the symbol for a group; however, it does not express more about the espoused values, as well as tacit assumptions. In (Schein et al. 2010 ), the author stated: “For a culture assessment to be valuable, it must get to the assumptions level. If the client system does not get to assumptions, it cannot explain the discrepancies almost always surface between the espoused values and the observed behavioral artifacts” (Schein et al. 2010 ). Hence, in order to be able to assess other cultures well, it is necessary for us to learn each other’s languages, as well as adapt to a common language. Moreover, we also need to look at the context of working, the solution for shared problems because these will facilitate to understand the culture better.

According to the OCP (Organizational Culture Profile) framework (Saremi and Nejad 2013 ), an organization is with possessing the innovation of culture, flexible and adaptable with fresh ideas, which is figured by flat hierarchy and title. For instance, Gore-Tex is an innovative product of W. L. Gore & Associates Inc., considered as the company has the most impact on its innovative culture (Boudreau and Lakhani 2009 ). Looking at the examples of Fast Company, Genentech Inc., and Google, they also encourage their employees to take challenges or risks by allowing them to take 20% of their time to comprehend the projects of their own (Saremi and Nejad 2013 ). In (Aldrich n.d. ), it is recorded that 25%–55% of employees are fully encouraged and giving a maximum value.

The famous quote by Peter Drucker , “Culture eats strategy for Breakfast” at page 67 has created a lot of interest in (Manning and Bodine 2012 ; Coffman and Sorensen 2013 ; Bock 2015 ). Despite we all know how important culture is, we have successively failed to address it (O'Reilly et al. 1991 ). The organizational research change process from the view of Schein ( 2009 ); it is a fact that whenever an organization has the intention of changing the culture, it really takes time. As we all acknowledge, to build an organizational culture, both leader and subordinate spend most of their time on learning, relearning, experiencing, as well as considering the most appropriate features. Sometimes, some changes are inevitable in terms of economic, political, technological, legal and moral threats, as well as internal discomfort (Kavanagh and Ashkanasy 2006 ; Schein 1983 ). As the case in (Schein 2009 ), when a CEO would like to make an innovation which is proved no effective response, given that he did not get to know well about the tacit implications at the place he has just come. It is illustrated that whatsoever change should need time and a process to happen (Blog 2015 ; Makhlouk and Shevchuk 2008 ). In conclusion, a new culture can be learned (Schein 1984 ), but with an appropriate route and the profits for all stakeholders should be concerned by the change manager (Sathe 1983 ).

It is true that people’s behavior managed by their types of culture (Kollmuss and Agyeman 2002 ). All tacit assumptions of insiders are not easy for outsiders to grasp the meaning completely (Schein 2009 ). It is not also an exception at any organization. Google is an example of the multicultural organization coming from various regions of the world, and the national or regional cultures making this multicultural organization with an official culture for the whole company.

In this case, the organizational culture of Google has an influence on the behaviors of manager and employee. In addition, as for such a company specializes in information technology, all engineers prefer to work on everything with data-evidence to get them involved in the meaningful survey about manager (Davenport et al. 2010 ). Eventually, Google discovered 8 good behaviors of manager, which effect to the role of “flow” also (Bulygo 2013 ; Garvin et al. 2013 ).

The role of the “flow” and building capacity for innovation

More and more people are using the term of “patient flow”. This overview describes patient flow and links to theories about flow. Patient flow underpins many improvement tools and techniques. The term “flow” describes the progressive movement of products, information, and people through a sequence of the process. In simple terms, flow is about uninterrupted movement (Nave 2002 ), like driving steadily along the motorway without interruptions or being stuck in a traffic jam. In healthcare, flow is the movement of patients, information or equipment between departments, office groups or organizations as a part of a patient’s care pathway (Bessant and Maher 2009 ). In fact, flow plays a vital role in getting stakeholders involved in working creatively and innovatively (Adams 2005 ; Amabile 1997 ; Forest et al. 2011 ). An effective ethical leader must create flow in work before transfer it to employees for changing the best of their effort to maintain, keep and develop “flow” in an engineering job, which job be easier to get stress. Definitely, Google gets it done very well.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the knowledge from my Master course, a credit of managing culture which helps me to write this paper. The author also gratefully acknowledges the helpful comments and suggestions of the reviewers and Associate Professor Khuong- Ho Van, who provided general technical help that all have improved the article.

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Center for Predoctoral Training, Vietnam National University–HCMC, Quarter 6, Linh Trung Ward, Thu Duc District, Ho Chi Minh, HCMC, Vietnam

Sang Kim Tran

Department of Research, Galaxy, 4/62 Nguyen Thi Minh Khai, Hoa Lan 1, Thuan Giao Ward, Binh Duong, 820000, Viet Nam

You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Contributions

The completed paper is solely written by the corresponding author.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sang Kim Tran .

Ethics declarations

Competing interests.

I obviously inform that there is not any competing interest to this paper.

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article.

Tran, S.K. GOOGLE: a reflection of culture, leader, and management. Int J Corporate Soc Responsibility 2 , 10 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40991-017-0021-0

Download citation

Received : 16 May 2017

Accepted : 15 November 2017

Published : 19 December 2017

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1186/s40991-017-0021-0

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

Organizational culture
Management style
Oxygen project

How Google Has Changed Management, 10 Years After its IPO

by Walter Frick

Google went public 10 years ago today, and since then has dramatically changed the way the world accesses information. It has also helped shape the practice of management. Staying true to its roots as an engineering-centric company, Google has stood out both for its early skepticism of the value of managers as well as for its novel, often quantitative approaches to management decisions. Along the way it became famous for its reliance on exceedingly difficult interview questions — later abandoned — and its “20% time” policy — reportedly on its way out .