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I think people typically misunderstand Google in two key ways that then causes them to misjudge it:

Google isn’t a start up. It is one of the largest companies in the world, with more than 150,00 employees and about as many contractors. Its peer companies, in terms of number of people, are General Motors, Darden Restaurants, and Aeon, to name a few. Just to try and put this into context, my entire current company (Stripe) is smaller than my product area at Google (YouTube).

Because many people still remember Google as a younger, smaller company, they judge Google’s agility against much younger and smaller companies instead of against its peer set. Certainly it’s less agile than it once was, but on a size adjusted basis it’s one of the most agile companies in the world.

Google is much more decentralized than a typical company. I joke that the best way to think about Google is a university attached to a money printing machine. Like a university, Google has many different departments that really aren’t trying to coordinate with each other. This is by design. You may not agree that this is the right strategy, but I think you have to understand it to effectively evaluate the company.

So what does Google get right? Here are four things that come immediately to mind for me.

• Product focus: an incredible amount of attention is paid at all levels of the company to the specifics of the product — what it actually does for the user. As a typical YouTube product manager, I regularly had to review product details with head of product, head of engineering, and other very senior leaders. These leaders, several levels up from me, were more well versed in the specifics of my product area than my manager or my head of product was at much smaller companies. This product focus isn’t top down, but cultural, which makes it much more powerful. People at Google encourage other people at Google to use their products and have opinions about how they should work.

• Distributed decision making: For me, this is where the misunderstandings about Google begin to really show up. Google is incredibly effective at decision making for a company of its size. An incredible amount of relatively high stakes decisions can be made at Google very quickly. As an example, if my team made a product change that positively impacted our key metrics, I could have that launched globally to billions of people in two 15 minute meetings.
  
  Additionally, Amazon gets a lot of mileage out of the Bezos API mandate, but it’s pretty common at Google as well to have some internal help text and an API be all that is needed for different orgs to collaborate. Additionally, as long as team incentives are aligned, it’s pretty easy for individual teams in different orgs to collaborate without any formal sign off from their Product Area Leads.
  
  Where things do get complicated at Google is major collaborations across product areas where there is a lot of ambiguity. So for instance, if I wanted to get a couple of teams from Google Maps and a couple of teams from YouTube to collaborate on a set of features with high but uncertain potential, I knew that this was going to be a difficult and challenging path. And yet, as difficult and challenging as this would be, on a per person basis, it was much easier to get collaborations like this to happen than at <1,000 employee companies that I’ve worked at.

• Talent friendliness and talent development. The slides and free lunches are really easy to make fun of, but Google legitimately tries to be a good place to work. The default policies are sensible and friendly to employees. When they make a change, they try to make sure to not punish their people along the way. It isn’t perfect, but especially for its size it’s really good.
  
  Beyond its policies, Google is a great place to develop your career if you’re thoughtful about it. As long as you’re keeping up with your day-to-day work, you can get exposure to almost any career path as a twenty percenter (once again, think of a university rather than a traditional company). Here the breadth of Google’s product offerings is a real asset; you can get exposure to almost any discipline or industry without changing companies.

Caveats: I worked at Google for about two and a half years, entirely at YouTube and mostly in the Zürich office. Google is a big place that varies a lot by team, so it’s entirely possible that my experience is an outlier. There are also many legitimate criticisms of the company that I’m not the best person to articulate.

Notes: 1: Alphabet

The podcast Revolutions by Mike Duncan is probably my favorite one these days. It follows the history of different revolutions, starting with the English Revolution in the first season and continuing through to the Russian Revolution in the current and final season.

Episode 100 of the Russian Revolution season is titled History Never Ends and it tells the story of how Lenin and the Communist Leaders, in the aftermath of the October Revolution, continuously sought a “breathing spell”, when things would calm down and they could implement Communist principles and begin improving the lives of the people. From the show:

This was the logic behind the treaty of Brest-Litovsk: make peace at enormous cost because we need a breathing spell. This was the great prize to be won during the civil war. If we defeat all our enemies, we shall be able to finally work in peace. But this breathing spell they yearned for was a mirage. And it's always a mirage. We all know from our own daily lives, that fabled next week or next month or next year, when we will finally be able to do all the things we have to put off today because we're too busy, too harried and dealing with too many other emergencies, big and small, sudden deadlines that force us to drop everything, unexpected events that just upend our lives, except when we get to that next week and next month and next year we find the same set of unexpected emergencies, often the same type in category that have stalked us throughout our lives. And we are forced back into our natural state of scrambling a reaction and improvising a response.

So what are the implications for leaders?

• You have to learn to differentiate between the different types of crises. One potential frame here: do you have more momentum or problems? Another: if you look across all the products and companies you know of, how would this season rate? If it’s not obviously a time of major crisis, it’s probably a time of minor crisis.

• You have to make the time and space to work on the long term. The time when it will be easy is never going to come and if you don’t do it today, it won’t be easier tomorrow.

• Expect a background level of chaos and messiness. Learn to perform at a high level in the midst of it.

Notes:

1. In my observation, companies tend to make some of their worst decisions in their moments of least crisis

2. An unrelated fact I learned from this episode: the reparations placed on Germany by France at the end of World War I was calculated to be the same amount plus interest that Bismark had placed on France after the Franco-Prussian War. How did Bismark get this number? By calculating an amount identical to what Napoleon imposed on Prussia in 1807.

Shoe Dog is the story of Phil Knight and the founding of Nike through the first 12 years of its existence. It’s a great entrepreneurial story, one that I would recommend to anyone starting a business, because of how honest it is about the journey.

Another thing I appreciated about this book was getting to know Nike before it was dominant. All my life, Nike has been the premier sportswear brand. I had no idea that it began life as Blue Ribbon. Or that it started out importing another company’s shoes, basically taking advantage of outsourced production. Or that it only launched the Nike brand when its production partner tried to go around it to distribute in the United States.

One final story from the book: the name almost wasn’t Nike. Knight’s most trusted lieutenant had observed “that seemingly all iconic brands—Clorox, Kleenex, Xerox—have short names. Two syllables or less. And they always have a strong sound in the name, a letter like “K” or “X,” that sticks in the mind.” Despite this insight, he very nearly named the company Dimension Six.

1: A benefit of having an executive team of distance runners: they have a high tolerance for pushing through pain towards a goal.

Often when I find myself stuck, it’s because I don’t have conviction about how to move forward. One option gives me part of what I think is important, another option gives me another part, but no option gives me everything I want. I can spend a lot of time churning with indecision, looking for an additional option that doesn’t exist.

Oddly, I find these situations harder to deal with in my personal life than in my professional life. It seems that at work I expect to be faced with choices where there is no ideal outcome, but running into this situation in my personal life is more distressing.

Recently I’ve been struck by the power of laying out the options that exist and “simply” choosing the least bad one. In practice, this looks more like:

1. Lay out the options

2. Make sure no other options exist

3. Identify the least bad one

4. Is there anything I can do to make this option even less bad?

5. Pick the least bad option

6. Decide to revisit the decision and/or how to move towards the ideal option in the future

So here’s to the least bad option: humbler and less satisfying than the best option, but powerful nonetheless.

1: I think of this Jon Gruber column about how Apple rolls, which I revisit about once a year.