The Hindu Business Line : `Some insight' into how Google is managed

The magazine has, citing extensive reader interest, now posted on its Web site material deleted from its earlier interview with Google co-founders, Mr Sergey Brin and Mr Larry Page.

It may be recalled that the earlier Playboy piece about "the Google guys," published on the eve of the search engine major's initial public offering, had made the company scramble to add the article to its filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) so that it would not run foul of the rules which prohibit firms from plugging their business during the quiet period leading up to a public offering.

The current Web edition of Playboy contains a posting, titled Google Interview 2.0, featuring "exclusive unpublished" excerpts from Playboy magazine's September, 2004, interview with Mr Page, which gives "some insight into how his innovative company is managed... "

Google Interview 2.0 kicks off with the question about growing companies losing "what made them great in the first place" and Google's plans for dealing with this problem "when it grows even larger."

In answer to the question, Mr Page talks at length about "the engineering side, where a lot of our creative work gets done."

According to Mr Page, in most companies' engineering departments, a manager manages seven to 10 people. However, layers get added on as the company grows and "people at the bottom are alienated from those at the top." Google, he points out, has managed to resist this so far. "We want a thin structure. It could be too thin. The downside is that people don't get the attention they need, especially the more junior people. But there's a trade-off. We're all more connected to one another, and more work gets done."

Responding to a Playboy question about why the system generates more work, Mr Page says: "Partly because more people are actually doing work, not just managing those who do the work. Our structure allows us to have an unusually large number of small projects going on all the time."

He adds: "If you have just a few huge projects and you realise you're going in the wrong direction, many people are on the wrong track. It's difficult to stop. Here, if a small group realises it's going in the wrong direction, the group can fix it quickly and move on... "

Mr Page goes on to explain how Google manages hundreds of projects without many levels of management, stating that the company has "pushed hard to automate many of the normal management functions."

He adds that the company has another system which sends everyone in the company a weekly e-mail asking them what they did the previous week.

"Everyone responds, and a program compiles all the responses." Google has declined to comment on the posting.