Integrating Culture and Diversity in Decision Making: Google Inc.

Integrating Culture and Diversity in Decision Making: Google Inc.

Introduction

The company I have selected for my assignment is GOOGLE. Google is known to be best admired company around the world, so much that people often use the word 'googling' instead of searching for information. It was founded by two PhD students at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergy Brin in 1996. The main mission of Google was to provide organized and accessible information to its user's world wide. The head office of Google- Googleplex is located at Mount View, California. Google prevented pop ads through its searching as it irritated the end user, unlike other search engines Google kept the end user in mind to gain popularity. Due to this Google became the most popular search engine available on the internet, with more than 1 billion searches in one day in 2009. Google started its operation in a garage in Palo Alto with only 10 employees, and it has more than 10,000 employees working globally. Besides the service of search engine Google also provide a wide array of services like online transactions, document sharing, image searching etc. According to Millward Brown Optimizer's Brand Google is regarded as the most powerful brand of the world, and remained on the number 1 spot from 2006 to 2009 (Kuntze, 2010).

Discussion

It is very difficult to assign a particular culture for Google. The organizational culture at Google is a mix of Innovative and People oriented culture. Innovative culture is described as the culture that is flexible, adaptable, and that promotes continuous innovation. The companies that adopt innovative culture are characterized by flat hierarchy, transparent management (Martin, 1992).

At Google innovation is the cornerstone to Google's culture. The organizational structure of Google is very flat and downplays the responsibility to employees. At Google, to practice innovation and implement change it is not necessary for an employee to consult different level of hierarchy, given that their course of actions are not against the framework of rules and regulations designed by the company. In 2001, it was reported that when was Google was in pursuit of rapid growth manager were hired to guide and oversee the works of the engineers. It was noticed that managers were restricting the innovativeness of the engineers. As a result, the managers were removed. This proves that innovative culture is deeply rooted in Google (Tower, 2006). ...