Research and Describe Leadership at Google Corporation (Essay Sample)

ETHICAL LEADERSHIP OF GOOGLE
(Author’s name)
(Institutional affiliation)
Google Corporation was founded by Larry page and Sergey Brin and they managed to take their search engine to position one because of their ability to create services (Reding, 2008). The choice of company name was based on the founders’ liking of the idea of filing a great amount of data presented on the internet. At the onset, Google started in a garage with a few servers which could index only twenty five million pages. Because of the company’s advertising strategies, it indexes about eight billion pages today.
The company made money by selling licenses for the use of their engine to different portals. The successes of the company encouraged the founders to work extra hard and to employ employees with a high level of expertise. One of the personnel was Schmidt, an individual who greatly contributed to the introduction of Ad words. This is an advertising feature that other companies could purchase for advertisement purposes. This led to an explosion of profit and turnover of Google with over 99% of its revenue being generated from this advertising feature.
The company has based most of its strategies on its free services because it has significant amount of cash which allows it to test different market segments and use the information for profitable future use. Also, this allows the company to employ several strategies that give its opponents no option other than to follow them or to adopt a better strategy which is an important aspect of avoiding Netscape syndrome. The company focuses on offering professional products to the public, which is their main target. This is a more natural way of letting the public use their products thereby allowing provision of cheap services to the public and thus value addition to the company.
The company’s main generators of revenue are advertising and research and development. Advertising feature of Google adapts to daily trends and tries to take advantage of radio and television spaces. The company’s leadership has formulated and implemented policies and methods that have enabled it to be a service provider to eBay and Amazon among other companies. The two companies serve as a source of income to Google and thus stabilizing its share prices. However, this method of the company to gain market share and revenue are subject to some conflicts. Also, the expansion of the company to new markets is risky because the leadership has limited experience in regard to understanding of the new markets (Scott, 2008).
Despite the conflicts and weaknesses, the company’s saturation is still desirable. This is characterized by a capitalization on stock exchange worth 100 billion dollars. Based on its progressive increase in share prices, there are prospects of the company controlling over 70% of the market. The leadership of Google has poached very skilled engineers from companies like Microsoft and this has made the company ahead of others in research and development.
In this regard, the company is currently purchasing fiber optics in America with the aim of creating an alternate internet which functions on Google but built on fiber optics. In fact this gives a good explanation why the company is offering diversified services. The company has an adequate revenue endowment that can enable the management to construct a private internet comprised of powerful search engines, fiber optics, servers and a big audience. (Duthel, 2008)
At the company, there is a regular functional structure that facilitates specializations in value chain activities. Since Google is a globally diversified company, its management positions are divided into different groups and regions for adequate management of its operations. It is a hybrid structure which is multidivisional and functional to ensure centralized planning which facilitates flexibility and innovation.
The culture of the company is based on its informal corporate slogan of not being evil. This strongly discourages any extent of user exploitation. Also, it is in line with the company’s vision of organizing more information and generating a lot of revenue. Another aspect of unique nature of Google is shown by use of a Dutch auction to determine first stock price in a bid to prevent insiders and institutions from hastily selling for profit. Employees of Google are treated properly in the form of standard fringe of benefits and first class social amenities like dining facilities and commuting buses (Girard, 2009).
This provides their hardworking employees with the incentives that discourage any absenteeism. Also, the company has transportation means that keeps its employees away from traffic jams. The company’s corporate environment is characterized by supply of free food to its employees. The company has a rule that gives its employees the opportunity to spend 70% of their time on activities related to the core business of the company. This gives room for free time which is used by the employees in related and unrelated activities. For example, the engineers use this time to develop new technologies and products.
The leadership of Google Corporation is largely influenced by the culture of its two founders. The leadership combines business and technical backgrounds, a key aspect of successful implementation of corporate infrastructure. This is important in maintaining its rapid growth. The top level management of Google Corporation communicates in first person so as to connect with investors. Managers are employed at unique positions so as to help maintain the company’s characteristics as was during start up. The leadership of the company creates an atmosphere favorable for staff to identify and enable innovation of different technologies.
The company has a leadership development and compensation committee that checks the compensation of the management team and works towards enticement and retention of skilled personnel. The salary package of its management team sends a positive message that the company is more interested on success of the company and stock performance than income generation. The company’s growth has not altered its distinct culture over the years. Recently, there were interests by management to reevaluate perks of its employees, time and infrastructure development in light of global economic recession (Weber, 2008).
In as much as it is critical to control spending, investments of Google produce huge returns and fuel the innovation and quick launch of new products. The leadership facilitates progressive company success by figuring out ways of working out of negative economic surrounding, and maintenance of a fun and productive ambience. When the company started, Google was accused of paying employees below industry averages. This was bad because of the high standards of living at the time in the area of Silicon Valley.
Today, the employees are well compensated at better rates than even those of Apple (Gilbert, 2008). Several companies, for example, Apple and Microsoft have been criticized of tight controls and monopolistic action s respectively. Therefore, Google is working hard to retain its fun image despite growth. The company is headed for recoil of keeping software correctitude because of increases in its platforms of cloud computing and smart phones. Despite the fact that such products have worked well for companies, the management of Google has to work harder to keep their culture open in order to keep its image.
The leadership uses a consistent mode of honest communication in a bid to achieve its goals and keeping its stakeholders happy. In this regard, the success of Google is attributed to the way it treats its stakeholders. To this far, the company has successfully implemented its vision and the company’s success in the future depends on the manner in which it leverages its experience while at the time staying true to its vision (Weber, 2008).
The company used laissez-faire policy of leadership during its earlier years. And the brilliance of its leadership has been promoted over the years by the smart engineers that it hires. The evolution of Google was marked by adaptation of some managers than others based on their ability to be good coaches, not micromanaging and being good communicators. The managers help their employees with career development because they have clear visions, technical skills and strategies for their teams.
Google ranks competencies from top to bottom and this helps the leaders to improve areas with the greatest return on its investments. The importance of technology and data ranking made the company to go against its cultural bias. Google took time to evaluate the leadership skills that are consistent with its culture by analyzing their own data and drawing up conclusions. In 2010, Google ceased operations in China because of repeated cyber attacks to monitor Gmail accounts of the activists of the communist nation. The original decision by Google to enter the Chinese market raised questions of Google’s commitment to ethics. The Chinese law forced Google to limit results of its search engines for Chinese users and Google entered the market of the most populous country in the world because it thought it could do more and because it faced a clear honorable difficult problem.
Reversal of the earlier decision created different costs and benefits dynamics that enhances that Google maintains moral soundness (Charan, Drotter & Noel, 2010). This is important for it to remain a feasible competitor it its market but Google’s mission of not doing evil facilitated initiation of a bold and decisive strives away from traditional corporate response other than compromising with the Chinese government on the cyber attacks.
This is an unlikely approach in the business world today which uses outsour...