By Harvey Mackay
For years, I’ve urged people to research backgrounds on customers and contacts at their public and college libraries. Since the computer search engine Google hit the scene in recent years, my advice has been “Go Google.” The results are instant. Not to mention what you’ll save on gas and parking.
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Want to “google” Google? Get a hold of “The Google Story” by David A. Vise and Mark Malseed. It traces the Google saga – the rise and r-i-s-e of one of the hottest meteors in business history.
In just a few short years, to “google” – to search for something on the Internet – has become a new word in everyone’s vocabulary. The term Google comes from googol, which in math is a colossal number – a one with a hundred zeros strung out afterwards!
Two Stanford graduate students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, stopped chasing their next sheepskins. Instead, they took their research project and turned it into a business worth more than $100 billion. Today, it’s the largest media company on the planet, and its initial public offering was the biggest in history. Last year, Google earned $3.8 billion on just over $6 billion in sales. A year ago, Brin and Page were each worth an estimated $10 billion.
You may not bring the next Google to market, but there are lessons to be learned from this company that are sage advice for any businessperson:
Disregard the impossible. Larry Page says, “I got this crazy idea that I was going to download the entire Web onto my computer.” He credits the idea to “having a healthy disregard for the impossible. … You should try to do things that most people would not.” From the telephone to the television, people have said the great innovations in history were either impossible or unusable. If you have the technical background, what star could you chase and possibly corner into the next blockbuster?
n Do the unexpected. Most people think that Google runs off a single computer the size of Cincinnati with a memory chip bigger than Mount Rushmore. In fact, Google is a network of “100,000 inexpensive PCs.” The ingenuity is in how Google has wired them together to operate its breakthrough search program. Google’s newest center is being constructed on the Columbia River in Oregon. One reason: cheap hydroelectricity.
Remember what they taught you at home. Brin and Page might have been Ph.D. dropouts, but they had computer programs in their blood and probably in their bassinets. Brin’s father is a math professor. Page’s father had a professorship in computer science, and his mother was a computer expert. If a special expertise is in your genes, or if it’s the topic hashed out nightly over the kitchen table, you may be smarter than you think – even if you apply that knowledge in different ways.
Use modern motivators. As Google got off the ground, they attracted top employees by offering incentives such as free food and laundry on the premises. They landed a blue-ribbon chef who had cooked for the Grateful Dead and whipped up irresistible buttermilk fried chicken. Another hot ticket: Google employees get to spend 20 percent of their time exploring whatever ideas interest them most. For 2006, Fortune rated Google as second only to the consulting firm McKinsey among top employers of freshly minted MBAs.
What you know now may not be what you become. Brin and Page started out on the trail of a computer science feat. But Google doesn’t make its money by being a search engine. Google’s oodles of dough are racked up by ad revenues from online advertising linked to its Web site. Who would have expected two computer nerds to redefine the world of Madison Avenue?
Rewrite the rules. The Google “main page” – the one most visited and the one clicked on first – doesn’t have a single ad. But the page is spruced up with seasonal clip art when holidays roll around. With pop-ups hammering your eyeballs everywhere on the Web, the Google doormat says welcome with homespun simplicity. And Brin and Page know how to give back: Google is digitizing millions of books from the world’s great libraries. For coming generations, Google could be their gateway to the A-to-Z textbook from cradle to grave.
Mackay’s Moral: Make the impossible boringly routine, and you can yawn all the way to the bank.
Harvey Mackay is author of the New York Times bestseller “Pushing the Envelope.” He can be reached through his Web site, www.mackay.com, or at Mackay Envelope Corp., 2100 Elm St., Minneapolis, MN 55414.
