As the “Stocks” app on my iPhone shows Apple approaching $500 per share, I can’t help but notice that Google has risen to over $600. I thought that kind of stock bubble had burst a long time ago and brought us all plunging down to reality in a most painful way. Still, it made me wonder – “How did Google become a verb?”
So I decided to take a closer look at how they’ve progressed over time. This quickly led me to their vision statement, one of my favorite topics when it comes to understanding how great companies evolve. I’ve written about corporate vision already in “Can You Say Where You’re Going?” But as a great case in point, it seems to me that Google has nailed it: To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
This is a great example of not just how clever or captivating a vision statement can be, but how effective it could become in a company’s trajectory. Effective as in, something that guides and shapes a company as it grows; something that tells employees how to think and what to care about even when no one is looking over their shoulder. Google is an example that illustrates how a well articulated vision can help a company grow into something truly remarkable, instead of just being one of the crowd.
When Google arrived on the scene, there were already a lot of Internet search engines in play. Infoseek, Overture, Excite and Netscape come to mind -- all of which either died on the vine or were absorbed by other search engines. Yahoo! was already around as well. But Google overtook them all through word of mouth because of a unique approach to search -- harness humans, through the presence of links on their web pages, to do what computers were bad at: rank the relevance of search results.
But let's face it, Google has become much more than a search engine. And frankly, their vision statement played a big role in what they are today. Originally, Google started as simply a better search engine. Imagine if they had focused their energy solely on search, a la: "The internet is out there, and we're going to continue to find ways to search it. We'll crawl it faster, we'll discover new ways to rank the results, and we'll come up with creative ways to display the results." You can imagine their leadership saying this in company meetings and in press releases. And after years of talking like that they'd have... a search engine.
But instead they put their finger on "organizing the world's information". Now they're not just satisfied to search the Web that's out there, they are insatiably collecting all the data they can get their hands on. They collect every search request, every keystroke, and every buying preference that comes their way. Not satisfied there, they scan books, newspapers and magazines in an effort to digitize all content that's ever been created.
When Google arrived on the scene, there were already a lot of Internet search engines in play. Infoseek, Overture, Excite and Netscape come to mind -- all of which either died on the vine or were absorbed by other search engines. Yahoo! was already around as well. But Google overtook them all through word of mouth because of a unique approach to search -- harness humans, through the presence of links on their web pages, to do what computers were bad at: rank the relevance of search results.
But let's face it, Google has become much more than a search engine. And frankly, their vision statement played a big role in what they are today. Originally, Google started as simply a better search engine. Imagine if they had focused their energy solely on search, a la: "The internet is out there, and we're going to continue to find ways to search it. We'll crawl it faster, we'll discover new ways to rank the results, and we'll come up with creative ways to display the results." You can imagine their leadership saying this in company meetings and in press releases. And after years of talking like that they'd have... a search engine.
But instead they put their finger on "organizing the world's information". Now they're not just satisfied to search the Web that's out there, they are insatiably collecting all the data they can get their hands on. They collect every search request, every keystroke, and every buying preference that comes their way. Not satisfied there, they scan books, newspapers and magazines in an effort to digitize all content that's ever been created.
And they organize the data they collect. Take Google Maps. What does that have to do with search? Not a whole lot, but it is a great way to organize the data after you've collected it. Privacy concerns aside (which definitely have to be considered), these guys are collecting data in unexpected places and doing amazing things with it. They can even track the flu faster than the CDC and are using that for the public good. . Here’s a link to one article about how they’ve managed that feat; it appeared in Nature in 2009, “Detecting influenza epidemics using search engine query data.”
The list of examples seems endless when you consider all the Google products that are out there. But even more importantly -- at least for those of us who are interested in how articulating corporate vision can inspire and build greatness – almost all of Google’s products would not have been created had they only focused on search. Almost none of them would have been created had they not started with a great vision for their company.
