Google‘s working practices are famously weird. Its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, argues that chaos is crucial to its corporate culture. Others say it’s just this sort of disorganisation that leads to snafus such as StreetView cars intercepting WiFi data.
But Mr Schmidt has no plans to change things.
“It’s very tempting to try to organise the chaos of Google. You would hope the CEO would be able to do that,” Mr Schmidt told the Guardian’s Activate conference in London on Thursday evening. But the “essence of the company is a little bit of disorganisation”, he said, because that allows it to see “what’s next”.
Mr Schmidt went on to stress the importance of 20 per cent time to Google, even saying that he himself took up the opportunity to spend one day a week on personal projects.
Twenty per cent time acts as an “escape valve” for employees who have “control freak type managers”, he said. “It serves as a check and a balance over bad managerial behaviour… You’re going to be more creative if you have some control over your time.”
During his own 20 per cent time, Mr Schmidt said he was “very interested in statecraft and foreign policy issues”, looking at how technology can change the public sector and international relations “militarily, operationally and culturally”.
“The most conservative organisations are the bureaucracies of monopoly governments,” he explained. “They operate on history and tradition… and they change very slowly. My personal view is that technology is about to upend the way governments and statecraft work.”
Mr Schmidt would like to see governments think in an “internet-first” way, using the web to see what people are “really doing, rather than just what they are saying they’re doing”.
The record of citizens reacting positively to internet surveillance is mixed to say the least, particularly in China, where Google is trying hard to evade online censors. Perhaps Mr Schmidt’s public-sector ideas are just another example of how technology is pushing the boundaries of privacy, something he admitted would be an “evergreen” question for Google from journalists and governments.
Even more intriguing was Mr Schmidt’s solution to the problems faced by the US and its allies in the Middle East. He would like to see the “trillion dollars that America has spent to invade and occupy Iraq” put to better use.
If the US had “simply used modern technology”, Mr Schmidt said, to build “a fibre optic system, including towers and including a surveillance structure that allows you to see where IEDs [improvised explosive devices] are put”, it could have saved “hundreds of millions of dollars and countless human lives”.
Unusual corporate thinking was also behind Google’s decision to put principle ahead of profit in China, he said. Google is still waiting to hear whether its licence to operate in the country – which expired on Thursday – has been renewed.
“No coherent commercial business would have made the decisions that we made in China,” Mr Schmidt said, given the negative impact on its (unspecified) Chinese revenues. “Google is a different kind of company.”
