9 rules of innovation from Google

March 11, 2008

Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products and user experience, is a tall, blond 32-year-old with two Stanford degrees in computer science. She’s also Google’s high priestess of simplicity.

Here she shares the rules that give the search giant its innovative edge.

原文鍊結

艾瑞克點評：xxx

原文如下：

1. Innovation, not instant perfection

"There are two different types of programmers. Some like to code for months or even years, and hope they will have built the perfect product. That’s castle building. Companies work this way, too. Apple is great at it. If you get it right and you’ve built just the perfect thing, you get this worldwide ‘Wow!’ The problem is, if you get it wrong, you get a thud, a thud in which you’ve spent, like, five years and 100 people on something the market doesn’t want."

"Others prefer to have something working at the end of the day, something to refine and improve the next day. That’s what we do: our ‘launch early and often’ strategy. The hardest part about indoctrinating people into our culture is when engineers show me a prototype and I’m like, ‘Great, let’s go!’ They’ll say, ‘Oh, no, it’s not ready.

It’s not up to Google standards. This doesn’t look like a Google product yet.’ They want to castle-build and do all these other features and make it all perfect."

"I tell them, ‘The Googly thing is to launch it early on Google Labs and then iterate, learning what the market wants–and making it great.’ The beauty of experimenting in this way is that you never get too far from what the market wants. The market pulls you back."

2. Ideas come from everywhere

"We have this great internal list where people post new ideas and everyone can go on and see them. It’s like a voting pool where you can say how good or bad you think an idea is. Those comments lead to new ideas."

3. A license to pursue your dreams

"Since around 2000, we let engineers spend 20% of their time working on whatever they want, and we trust that they’ll build interesting things. After September 11, one of our researchers, Krishna Bharat, would go to 10 or 15 news sites each day looking for information about the case. And he thought, Why don’t I write a program to do this? So Krishna, who’s an expert in artificial intelligence, used a Web crawler to cluster articles."

"He later emailed it around the company. My office mate and I got it, and we were like, ‘This isn’t just a cool little tool for Krishna. We could add more sources and build this into a great product.’ That’s how Google News came about. Krishna did not intend to build a product, but he accidentally gave us the idea for one."

"We let engineers spend 20% of their time working on whatever they want, and we trust that they’ll build interesting things."

4. Morph projects don’t kill them

"Eric [Schmidt, CEO] made this observation to me once, which I think is accurate: Any project that is good enough to make it to Labs probably has a kernel of something interesting in there somewhere, even if the market doesn’t respond to it. It’s our job to take the product and morph it into something that the market needs."

5. Share as much information as you can

"People are blown away by the information you can get on MOMA, our intranet. Because there is so much information shared across the company, employees have insight into what’s happening with the business and what’s important."

"We also have people do things like Snippets. Every Monday, all the employees write an email that has five to seven bullet points on what you did the previous week. Being a search company, we take all the emails and make a giant Web page and index them."

"If you’re wondering, ‘Who’s working on maps?’ you can find out. It allows us to share what we know across the whole company, and it reduces duplication."

6. Users, users, users

"I used to call this ‘Users, Not Money.’ We believe that if we focus on the users, the money will come. In a truly virtual business, if you’re successful, you’ll be working at something that’s so necessary people will pay for it in subscription form. Or you’ll have so many users that advertisers will pay to sponsor the site."

7. Data is apolitical

"When I meet people who run design at other organizations, they’re always like, ‘Design is one of the most political areas of the company. This designer likes green and that one likes purple, and whose design gets picked? The one who buddies up to the boss.’

Some companies think of design as an art. We think of design as a science. It doesn’t matter who is the favorite or how much you like this aesthetic versus that aesthetic. It all comes down to data. Run a 1% test [on 1% of the audience] and whichever design does best against the user-happiness metrics over a two-week period is the one we launch. We have a very academic environment where we’re looking at data all the time.

We probably have somewhere between 50 and 100 experiments running on live traffic, everything from the default number of results to underlined links to how big an arrow should be. We’re trying all those different things."

8. Creativity loves constraints

"This is one of my favorites. People think of creativity as this sort of unbridled thing, but engineers thrive on constraints. They love to think their way out of that little box: ‘We know you said it was impossible, but we’re going to do this, this, and that to get us there.’"

9. You’re brilliant? We’re hiring

"When I was a grad student at Stanford, I saw that phrase on a flyer for another company in the basement of the computer-science building. It made me stop dead in my tracks and laugh out loud."

"A couple of months later, I’m working at Google, and the engineers were asked to write job ads for engineers. We had a contest. I put, ‘You’re brilliant? We’re hiring. Come work at Google,’ and got eight times the click rate that anyone else got.

"Google now has a thousand times as many people as when I started, which is just staggering to me. What’s remarkable, though, is what hasn’t changed–the types of people who work here and the types of things that they like to work on. It’s almost identical to the first 20 or so of us at Google."

"There is this amazing element to the culture of wanting to work on big problems that matter, wanting to do great things for the world, believing that we can build a successful business without compromising our standards and values."

"If I’m an entrepreneur and I want to start a Web site, I need a billing system. Oh, there’s Google Checkout. I need a mapping function. Oh, there’s Google Maps. Okay, I need to monetize. There’s Google AdSense, right? I need a user name and password-authentication system. There’s Google Accounts."

"This is just way easier than going out and trying to create all of that from scratch. That’s how we’re going to stay innovative. We’re going to continue to attract entrepreneurs who say, ‘I found an idea, and I can go to Google and have a demo in a month and be launched in six.’"

Strategic Intuition: The Key to Innovation
JUNE 27, 2006
Combining ideas from military history, cognitive psychology and modern neuroscience, strategic intuition offers a four-step method for identifying and capturing opportunity.

原文鏈結

艾瑞克點評：創意的產生應該是結合分析與直覺的結果，不斷的添加新的資訊並發散與收斂才能產生出最佳創意。

原文如下：
Several years ago, Professor William Duggan was intrigued to learn that while most common English words date back to at least the 15th or 16th century, the word strategy entered the language only in 1810. He set out to discover why. It turned out that in 1810 Napoleon Bonaparte was at the height of his power, and in that year Carl von Clausewitz began his classic treatise On War, which attempts to explain Napoleon’s military success. “Von Clausewitz describes something as the essence of strategy that he calls coup d’oeil, which in French means ‘glance,’” Duggan says. “And it occurred to me that it seemed an awful lot like modern research on expert intuition.”

That connection led Duggan to a concept he calls strategic intuition — a framework for understanding how great strategists set and achieve goals. He articulated the idea in two books, Napoleon’s Glance and The Art of What Works, both published in 2003. So when the U.S. Army asked him to explore the implications of strategic intuition for Army planning procedures, the idea came full circle — back to its military origins.

In On War, finally published in 1832, von Clausewitz points out that instead of pursuing territorial objectives, Napoleon looked for opportunities to win battles. A profound student of military history, Napoleon sought to apply the successful tactics of past generals to new situations. Von Clausewitz describes four elements of Napoleon’s approach to strategy: (1) examples from history, (2) presence of mind, (3) a coup d’oeil or flash of insight, and (4) the resolution to move forward and overcome all obstacles.

Research on expert intuition supports the notion that in urgent situations, people make decisions by combining analysis of past experience with a flash of insight. In the 1990s psychologist Gary Klein studied the decision-making processes of emergency room nurses, firefighters and soldiers in battle. While these experts initially attributed their choices to intuition, further probing revealed that they were actually making rapid connections between the situation at hand and similar situations stored in their memories.

Recent brain research provides further evidence that people make decisions through a combination of analysis and intuition. In 2000 a group of neuroscientists won the Nobel Prize for a new model of the brain called intelligent memory, which overturned the previous left-brain/right-brain model. “Basically as you go through life, you’re putting things on the shelves of your brain,” says Duggan. “The scientists call it parsing; it’s technically analysis. Your brain is constantly comparing what it’s taking in to what’s already there, and when it finds a combination — a synthesis — you have an insight.”

After making the connection between von Clausewitz and modern science, Duggan defined the common idea as strategic intuition: “the selective projection of past elements into the future in a new combination as a course of action that might or might not fit your previous goals, and the personal commitment to work out the details along the way.”

Last year Duggan reviewed the core procedures in the Army’s standard planning manual to see how well they fit with strategic intuition. In the resulting publication, Coup d’Oeil: Strategic Intuition in Army Planning, he notes that the manual reflects an outdated view of the human mind — the idea that analysis and intuition take place in separate parts of the brain and are appropriate for different situations. In reality, as the new brain research shows, analysis and intuition are closely intertwined in all situations.

Strategic intuition describes how breakthrough ideas happen in all realms of human endeavor, from business to politics to art. “This might sound like the opposite of an innovation, but in a practical sense this is how innovation actually happens,” says Duggan. “And even in business this is an old idea — the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter basically said this in the 1940s. So it’s something that we rediscover again and again and again. I trace its earliest origins to the Tao Te Ching in ancient China, 450 BC.”

In a course that Duggan teaches in Columbia’s MBA, Executive MBA and Executive Education programs, he introduces strategic intuition with a famous quote from Thomas Edison: “Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” Duggan adds, “What we’re talking about here is the one percent. It’s only one small piece of the puzzle. But if you don’t have inspiration, your perspiration is a waste of time.”

Once you understand how strategic intuition works, you can identify opportunities that you might otherwise have missed by following these four steps:

1. Examples from history

If the shelves of your brain are well stocked, you are more likely to make an important connection. Napoleon and Patton, two of the most successful generals who ever lived, both had an encyclopedic knowledge of military history. “They were famous for not choosing a strategic objective, like a city or a bridge or a fort, but rather putting their armies in motion,” says Duggan. “When they recognized a strategic situation from past battles, they would replicate that battle or pieces of that battle to defeat the enemy. They fought battles; they didn’t conquer territory. But in doing so they defeated the enemy.”

2. Presence of mind

The key to presence of mind is expecting the unexpected. In order to open your mind to a coup d’oeil, you must abandon your preconceived notions of what the solution might be — or sometimes even what the problem is. “Sometimes people don’t see what to do, and that’s OK,” Duggan says. “They should keep searching and keep looking for opportunity. And if they’re prepared and aware and have great presence of mind, they will see the opportunity that indeed might take them in a different direction than if they had first tried to plan without an idea of how actually to fulfill the plan.”

3. A flash of insight

A coup d’oeil is not a totally new idea but rather a new way of combining past ideas from different sources. For example, Ransom Olds was the first carmaker to build a mass-produced car using a stationary assembly line, and Henry Ford copied that car quite closely in both its design and its manufacturing process. Then on a visit to the Chicago stockyards, where carcasses were hung on a rail and moved from station to station, Ford got a flash of inspiration — and the moving assembly line was born.

A coup d’oeil can show you how to reach a goal, but it can also change your goal — an idea that many people find difficult to accept. “Most strategic planning typically says, first, ‘What’s your goal?’” says Duggan, “and then it helps you plan. It doesn’t really care what the goal is. Whereas strategic intuition offers a way to answer the question ‘What’s a good goal?’ And a good goal is one that you see some way to reach, based on some combination of things you can put together from the past.”

4. Resolution

Resolution in this context is more than simply the determination to achieve your goal. It includes an element of flexibility — the willingness to move forward without a detailed plan and also the willingness to change course if a better opportunity presents itself. In Napoleon’s first campaign, his men were vastly outnumbered by Italian and Austrian troops. But because the situation resembled several campaigns of Frederick the Great some 50 years earlier, Napoleon had an idea: he would move his army between the Italian and Austrian armies and fight first one enemy and then the other.

“His goal came out of some historical sense of what would work, and he projected that into this situation, which was not identical,” says Duggan. “He had a general goal rather than a detailed plan, and he put his army in motion and indeed he defeated each enemy army in turn, in a series of battles. He had no idea beforehand where the battles were going to be, but as they emerged he saw the opportunity there. So strategic intuition is not against goal setting. It just asks the question ‘Where does your goal come from?’ And then it says your goal is as detailed as you see — not more so — and that you fill the details in as you can.”

In Duggan’s strategy course, participants create a map of all the goals that might make them happy and all the opportunities they currently see that might get them to one goal or another. “The idea of having multiple possible directions is much more realistic in life and gives you many more options,” says Duggan. “But if you already have a five-year goal and know exactly what you’re going to do and really are trying to get there, that’s fine. Just remember that some opportunity may arise that will take you somewhere better.”

William Duggan is associate professor of management at Columbia Business School.