Ahead of the Curve

by Philip Delves Broughton

  Peter Drucker, the great authority on late-twentieth-century management, wrote that “An employer has no business with a man’s personality. Employment is a specific contract calling for specific performance . . . Any attempt to go beyond this is usurpation. It is immoral as well as an illegal intrusion of privacy. It is abuse of power. An employee owes no ‘loyalty,’ he owes no ‘love’ and no ‘attitudes’—he owes performance and nothing else.”

  Why was it then that every speaker who came to Harvard Business School demanded we be “passionate” about our work? There were several ways of looking at this. The first was that the speakers genuinely cared about our enjoying our professional lives. In that case, advising us to follow our passion made a lot of sense. Loving what we did would make working that much less hellish. Another interpretation was that the word passion was just another form of corporate coercion. It was no longer enough simply to do a job that you found okay for a reasonable financial reward. You had to say you were passionate about your work even if you found the work meaningless and unsatisfying. And then, of course, if it was your passion, why wouldn’t you want to stay in the office until late at night and all weekend long? Didn’t you say it was your passion? Then why are you going home so early? Not playing on the softball team? Skipping the company barbecue?

  Visitors to campus would say in that manic, evangelical way, “Business outsourcing is my passion”; “I have a passion for delivering product to customers”; “Here at Widgets Incorporated, we are passionate about enterprise resource management systems.” But isn’t the truth that passion is a fleeting sensation, one that most humans are lucky to feel even once in their lives? In love, we speak of the first flush of passion, which dims to become something else. We talk of the passionate intensity of composers, artists, and freedom fighters. Perhaps the very greatest businesspeople, the ones whose lives are dominated by their work, share this passion. But the rest of us?

  A third explanation was that businesses used the word passion because it reflected what they wanted their employees to feel. Work at its best should be about passion, not just drudgery. A few lucky souls might feel genuine passion for their work, but companies used the word so freely, I sensed, because it set a loftier goal for their activities than mere profits. To be in the business of business was not enough. You had to be about something bigger. But where did businesses go after passion? Was it only a matter of time before the head of the Boston Consulting Group told an MBA class, “We bring a panting, sexual intensity to our work.” Or the recruiter from Fidelity: “Our analysts share a knee-trembling, quivering, orgasmic degree of focus on company fundamentals.” Or the CFO of Goldman Sachs: “In the people we hire, we expect to see a stalkerish obsession with financial performance and a downright creepy fascination with the office and all that goes on there, to the total exclusion of anything else, which might bring moments of serendipitous joy to their dreary lives. Going home at any time of day or night signals to us a lack of absolute, maniacal commitment. We demand total devotion.” What would sound like the ravings of a madman coming from, say, Kim Jong-Il had become perfectly commonplace coming from business leaders. The obsession with a single firm-wide culture. Discipline. Order. Unrelenting assessment by one’s peers. The fear of denouncement. A cult of the leader.

  A new and potent recruiter on campus was Google. A delegation from the company had visited in October. A recent hire from HBS got up and said that her day consisted mostly of dealing with e-mail and going to meetings. She added that because the company was growing so fast, she often didn’t know what the meetings were all about. Then she handed out pens and T-shirts with the slogan “Do you feel lucky?” and a stack of papers describing jobs the company needed to fill. Almost all of them required either a degree in computing or several years of work experience at a technology company. I passed.

  But during my early January slump, I returned to Google’s online job site. I had fond memories of my visit to the firm during the Westrek. I found a posting for a job marketing Book Search, Google’s effort to digitize and make searchable all of the world’s books. The requirements were experience in the media or publishing industries and an MBA. The job was based in New York and would involve talking to libraries, publishing houses, authors, and readers trying to get everyone excited and in legal agreement. Book Search was one of those products that had run into trouble because of Google’s lack of focus. Google had a powerful vision: all the world’s books readable and searchable online, available to every man, woman, and child with an Internet connection, regardless of their location or educational or economic situation. It would be the library of Alexandria made virtual and accessible to all. But well-organized opponents of the plan said Google was trying to seize control of the publishing industry, to impoverish authors and publishers, to take the whole cloth of books and chop them into incomplete threads of information. Authors like John Updike accused Google of trying to destroy the pleasures of holding a book or wandering the aisles of a secondhand book shop hoping to make a serendipitous discovery. Google, they said, was going to fragment our attention spans and overturn centuries of the printed word. It was a debate I could get into.

  Everyone who had applied for jobs at Google told me the interview process was a shambles. Decisions were hard to elicit. E-mails and telephone calls were ignored. You had to speak to ten or more people, who had to reach a consensus before sending your case up to Larry Page, one of the company’s founders. Even though Google now had more than five thousand employees, he still liked to vet every single hire. One of my section mates had received his job offer at two o’clock on a Saturday morning, in an e-mail sent from a Google executive’s BlackBerry. Knowing all this, I thought I’d just Zen out and see what happened.

  Three weeks after I sent in my application, I received an e-mail inviting me to interview by telephone with a product manager at Google’s headquarters in Silicon Valley. The interview would last half an hour. The first few minutes were personal stuff—“why had I gone to business school” questions. In the second half, my interviewer set what he called “big, hairy, audacious goals” and asked me how I would reach them. For example, how would I develop an electronic reading device, market it, and get it into the hands of five million people in three months. Google, he said, liked big, hairy goals. I told him I’d try to do a tie-in with Oprah’s Book Club or perhaps an educational book publisher and popularize the device on college and high-school campuses.

  Ten days later, I received another e-mail. Would I be available for another telephone interview? I prepared for more big, hairy goals. I saw them in my mind as enormous sea urchins, black and prickly, dripping with slime, floating out in space with one gloopy eye on the lookout for approaching business school students, primed to zap them with foul-smelling musk. This interview ran for forty-five minutes, but the interviewer sounded glum. It turned out he had owned his own technology company and sold it to Google. He hadn’t made as much money from the deal as he had hoped and was locked in for another couple of years. “I’d say I spend ninety percent of my day dealing with internal meetings and e-mails,” he told me. I imagined him in his cubicle at the end of another day in Mountain View, California, his ever-blinking in-box draining all that was left of his strength. A week later, in late February, I heard that the company wanted to fly me out to California for a full day of interviews.

  It was a bright afternoon in San Jose when I arrived. The sun was a welcome change after the gloom of Boston. The hotel Google had booked for me was full, so I was sent to stay in a motel beside a shopping mall. The room was dark, overlooked a car park, and had that slightly sweet funk that made me think of businessman after businessman lying on the bed watching pornography. I dropped my bag and went out. I found a branch of Jamba Juice and sat outside, freezing my brain with a Passion Berry Breeze and flicking through the paperwork sent to me by Google. The documents read as if they had been written by a particularly grating high-school student. One sheet contained instructions for
reclaiming expenses: “If you eat at a restaurant, be sweet and leave a tip of no more than 15%, just be sure to indicate it on each meal receipt . . . Be sure to submit your expenses within 15 days of incurring them . . . You snooze you lose! . . . We firmly believe paperwork is your friend . . . As such we may request additional clarification and detail on any business related expense in question—don’t be offended, just chalk it up to paperwork love.” Sitting there in the sticky warmth of the California evening, reading this and watching the cars drive in and out of the parking lot and the traffic lights swinging overhead, I felt a long, long way from home.

  The next morning at nine, I stood outside the hotel waiting for a shuttle bus I had been promised would take me to Google. I had had a fitful night under a thin blanket, disturbed by the sound of my neighbor’s television burbling through the thin wall until two o’clock. A white stretch limousine pulled up in front of the hotel, and a young man in an embroidered gold waistcoat hopped out.

  “Mr. Broughton?”

  “You must be kidding,” I said, staring at the car.

  “Our normal SUV has some problems, so we’re having to use the wedding limo.” A piece of cardboard was flapping from the roof. “Sorry about this. The sunroof’s broken.” I clambered in the back. A row of dirty scotch glasses clattered in a rack as I closed the door. I couldn’t believe it. I was going to interview at a company that prided itself on being egalitarian and unshowy, where the employees dressed in T-shirts and flip-flops, where the company motto was “Don’t Be Evil,” and here I was showing up like Dr. Dre at the Vibe awards.

  Google’s headquarters, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, was a sprawling glass-and-metal complex originally built for Netscape, a former Internet titan that had been steamrolled by Microsoft. It sat in the middle of nowhere in particular, hemmed in by roads and freeways. The buildings curved and swerved around open-air volleyball courts and trees. Linking them were walkways that rose and fell gently from the ground as if lifted by a breath of wind. It felt like a college campus or the headquarters of a progressive church. Through every window you could see someone working, many staring at two screens simultaneously. The people were eclectic, from long-haired Viking look-alikes and surfer dudes to buttoned-down white men in striped shirts and khakis, all carrying their ThinkPads under their arms. But first I had to get in. The white limo passed security and tried to negotiate a small, tight traffic circle. Behind us waited a line of humble Toyotas and Hondas, each containing a Google zillionaire. As we pulled to a halt, I heard a crunch from the front bumper. The driver backed up. Crunch again, this time from the side. He nudged forward, then backward again. I could see the sweat pearling on his forehead when he turned to try looking out the rear window.

  “Let’s try this again,” he said. Sccrrunch. “We may be just a little bit stuck here.”

  “I’ve got to get out,” I said, gathering up my things. I tried opening one door, but it was jammed. I pushed open the other door and ran up a flight of steps away from the limo, just as two security guards approached to assess the developing crisis. I glanced back briefly to see the traffic into the Googleplex stretching all the way down a street lined with palm trees. I ducked into Building 42. Above the receptionist a screen showed a real-time selection of search requests made by Google users: lawnmowers, tennis, Bush, anal, Omaha steaks. I grabbed one of the free fruit juices stacked in a refrigerator by the door and plunked myself down on a purple sofa to recover and get my head right. Eventually I was shown to a small, windowless meeting room painted pale gray, with just enough room for a round table and two chairs. This would be my home for the day. I wedged my bags and myself into one corner and waited.

  It was 10:00 A.M. and my schedule was full until 5:30—seven interviews in a row, with a break for lunch. The first one began with the usual questions. Why Google? Why business school? Why marketing? Yes, why exactly marketing?

  Lots of people at business school had very precise ideas of the kind of function they wanted to pursue. When I turned up at HBS, I did not even know what a business “function” was, let alone which one suited me best. Was I a finance person, or more suitable for marketing, or product management, or strategy? I hadn’t a clue. During long discussions on the Spangler sofas, I had learned that product managers at technology companies needed to speak at least two, and possibly three, languages. They needed to talk to software engineers and understand their peculiar whims and desires. But they also needed to talk to users and consumers and understand what they wanted. Somewhere in the middle, they had to talk business and make money from their product. The main challenge in this job was communication. You had to persuade engineers, whose characters tend naturally to the perfectionist and obsessive, that at some point they must tailor their work not to some technical ideal but to actual consumer wants. At the same time you had to help educate consumers and develop a business model.

  At companies like Google there were fleets of gleaming MBAs all product-managing like crazy. A few managed entire products, such as Gmail, Google’s e-mail service, or AdWords, its advertising service to businesses. But most served on product management teams, where they managed tiny pieces of a product and spent a lot of time e-mailing one another. Lurking below the product managers were the product marketing managers. At a company like Procter and Gamble, which made commodity products such as toothpaste and toilet paper, marketing was king. You were never going to distinguish your toilet paper from a competitor’s on functionality alone. It was all about the brand and the way you marketed it. The most senior managers at P&G tended to rise through marketing and sales, and it is what drove the business. At Google, marketing was treated as an afterthought. The marketers fought fires as they arose, tried to offer some customer feedback and ideas for launching new products. But the department was mostly ignored and understaffed. Engineering was where the action was. It was understandable. Google grew to be a multibillion-dollar company without spending a dime on advertising. The excellence of its search product spoke for itself. Such success was a computer scientist’s fantasy. Build a wonderful product and people use it in droves. No need for the fluff and hype of advertising. These were deeply practical people who loved things that worked, hated things that didn’t, and were not going to be swayed by a twenty-foot-high billboard telling them a brand of underpants would make them more attractive to women.

  The problem was that as Google’s success attracted envy and competition, it had to engage in marketing. It could no longer hide out in Mountain View making billions and ignoring the world. As it built its business in China, stored personal data in the United States, and took on industries ranging from book publishing to telecommunications, it prompted suspicion and accumulated enemies. Still, this did not mean the company had to like marketing. One woman in my section turned down a marketing job at Google because she said she would be standing on the other side of the fence from the rest of the company just waiting for them to toss over a sack load of products when they were ready for release. Marketing would never be part of how Google developed products. The department was just there to keep the various freaks and misfits who populated the engineering department from ever having to deal with the world. As far as I was concerned, as a Google marketing manager, you got paid, were issued some of that precious stock, and got ignored by some geeks. It could be worse. I told my interviewers that Google had a serious public image problem waiting to explode, much as Microsoft’s had, and that it needed good communicators like me to help defuse the bomb. I said I was a keen Google user, which I was, and that I believed Book Search was a thrilling concept, which I did. As each interview progressed, we tried out some big, hairy goals. So, if you like photo-sharing, what would you like to be able to do that you can’t do now? How would you launch that feature? How would you get ten million people using it in six weeks? How would you get print publishers to use Google as a medium for getting advertisers? What exactly would you do? What kind of events would you organize? So you would invite all these publi
shers to Silicon Valley and then what? As a journalist, what article would you most like to write about Google? Is it evil not to disclose our cut of advertising revenue to our publishing partners? It was all rather like business school, the persistent search for answers and action plans as well as analysis.

  My interviewers were uniformly nice. There was a woman in her twenties who had joined the company as an administrator well before the IPO and had risen up. I suspected she had made an awful lot of money, as she didn’t seem to much care about whether product marketing worked. There was a man in his late thirties who rushed in from the gym, still sweating and gulping from a water bottle. He had been in sales all his career and talked quickly and nervously. He asked me to explain the network effect of Google’s business, how more users meant more advertisers meant more users meant more advertisers, and so on and so on, to incalculable profits and overwhelming market share. There was a woman who had been handling the marketing for Book Search over the past few months, when publishers and authors had turned on it. “I told them we had a problem, but they didn’t believe me until it appeared in The Wall Street Journal,” she said, but she didn’t seem too concerned.

  In between interviews, I would go to a nearby snack area, stuff my pockets with free malt balls and yogurt-dipped pretzels, and throw back a large espresso. By the end of the day, my breath must have stunk like Satan’s bowels.

  A number of people had told me that the fizz had gone out of Google since the initial public offering had made everyone so rich. I certainly got that feeling. Apart from the sales guy, there was none of the oomph I had been expecting. Perhaps it was just a California thing. Maybe the software engineers are so brilliant that the rest of the company can just ride their coattails. Or maybe I was just shocked that really, honestly, they weren’t evil.