Google’s astonishing success in its first decade now seems to have been almost inevitable. But step inside its systems infrastructure group, and you quickly learn otherwise. The company’s meteoric growth depended in large part on its ability to innovate and scale up its infrastructure at an unprecedented pace. Bill Coughran, as a senior vice president of engineering, led the group from 2003 to 2011. His 1,000-person organization built Google’s “engine room,” the systems and equipment that allow us all to use Google and its many services 24/7. “We were doing work that no one else in the world was doing,” he says. “So when a problem happened, we couldn’t just go out and buy a solution. We had to create it.”
Collective Genius
Reprint: R1406G
How can leaders build an organization that is capable of innovating continually over time? By creating a community that is both willing and able to innovate.
To be willing, the community must share a sense of purpose, values, and rules of engagement. When Luca de Meo was Volkswagen’s head of marketing communication, he fostered a sense of purpose in his team by asking its members to reflect on what being part of VW meant to them; strengthened their shared values by encouraging them to use the brand’s three components—innovation, responsibility, and value—to guide their work; and built significant responsibility and autonomy into their rules of engagement.
To be able, companies must generate ideas through discourse and debate; experiment quickly, reflect, and adjust; and make decisions that combine disparate and even opposing ideas. Bill Coughran, an SVP of engineering at Google, employed these capabilities both to solve the company’s near-term data storage needs and to make progress toward a next-generation solution.