Google Organizational Structure

Introduction

Organizational excellence is defined as outstanding practice in managing organizations and delivering value for customers and other stakeholders (Moullin, 2007).Google Inc. is an organization that is an example of organizational excellence. Google exhibits creative organizational excellence. It is often associated with creativity and path-breaking innovation. Autonomy of thought has been the driving force behind the greatest successes of Google. It is not a company that gets comfortable doing what it has always done, with a few incremental changes. It is an organization that believes in bringing about revolutionary changes by investing in areas that may seem wildly speculative, such as self-driving cars and balloon-powered Internet.1

Organizational structure Google is led by a CEO, who is guided by board members and supported by Executives. The CEO is in charge of the entire administrative framework. The vastly experienced board members guide the organization in its future endeavours. Members of the Executive Committee are in charge of specific departments and are assisted by the Operational Heads.6,7 The structure reflected in the organization is a vertical structure with a control based mechanism. This mechanistic structure followed by Google helps enhance efficiency and productivity.9

In the initial phase of its growth, Google was not led by a single CEO. Instead, it was led by a team of leaders belonging to different generations. Their varied expertise gave Google immense strategic and management strength. Eric Schmidt, the current Executive Chairman, was brought in as an advisor to the young co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. This bi-generational leadership model played an important role in the transformation of Google into a successful startup.8 This strategy helps in achieving the advantages of organic design at the top level through informal communication and shared decision-making. Similarly, at each level, the organization supports informal communication to enhance cross-departmental collaboration. Employees are provided with proper hierarchical referrals as well as informal communication over the same level.9 The geographical expansion of Google is being taken care of by its

Strategy

Considering the criteria put forth by Michael E. Porter, Google can be classified as an organization that has adopted the strategy of differentiation. Therefore, Google’s strategy is characterized by a strong focus on flexibility, research, and innovation. This strategy is developed and implemented by employees who are creative and not averse to taking risks.10 Google believes in developing strategies that are adaptable to the changes in products and the market and believes that a right team is central to the success of such a dynamic strategy.11

Every strategy developed by Google is guided by three principles: Bet on technical insights that help solve a big problem in a novel way, optimize for scale, not for revenue, and let great products grow the market for everyone. Google believes that companies should be guided by technical insights rather than market research since it is important to respond earlier than demanded. For example, Google News was based on the insight that news stories should be grouped by topic rather than source.12 Google accomplishes quick scaling by adopting the “grow big fast” strategy. This strategy makes use of technology-based platforms to reach millions of customers in a short span of