The Google story started as a legend of popular culture.
In 1995, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, graduate students at Stanford University, figured out a way to scan and index the Internet. By 1998, they had incorporated Google, coming up with a company name that suggested the audacity of their ambition. ("Googol" is the math term for the figure 1 followed by a hundred zeros.) And they came up with an informal company motto to signal their benign intent: "Don't be evil." Today, Google reaches billions of pages of content.
In 2001, Page and Brin hired their first CEO, Eric Schmidt, who had a Ph.D. in computer science and twenty years of management experience in tech companies; most recently, he had been the CEO of Novell. They settled on an unusual power-sharing arrangement. As Schmidt describes it, "We've agreed that any major decisions the three of us agree."
By 2002, when I began advertising with Google, the company had become very profitable, thanks to a novel program called AdWords, in which advertisers bid to display their ads whenever the user searches for keywords. If the user then clicks on the advertisement---a "sponsored link"---Google earns revenue on a pay-per-click basis.
Through the period of March of 2002 to March of 2011, my small executive coaching company, Signature, Inc., spent over $56,900 on Google AdWords advertisements. However, because of a lack of awareness of policy changes by Google and its decision to outsource AdWords customer service to India (even though Google has an AdWords office here in Ann Arbor, MI, USA), my company's AdWords expenditures have been terminated (due a lack of Google management oversight and its customer service being lost in translation).
Now, Google leadership seems to recognize that its management capability needs improvement and has taken action to realign top management effective April 2011 and begin to re-engineer management oversight by training its managers to improve internal and external communication.
Google's Corporate Growing Pains Began to Show in the Beginning of 2008
Google Inc. in February 2008 had its second straight month of disappointing growth in "paid clicks," a key metric that reflected the overall health of the company, according to data released by research firm comScore Inc.
Since then, the company has been harvesting its dominant market share by raising AdWords "cost per click" advertisements to improve corporate revenue. Concurrently, online advertising competition has increased with Microsoft/Yahoo and others digging into Google's search engine advertising market share through providing better value to online advertisers.
The key question is does Google's top management have the leadership capability required to turnaround a company whose glory days may have been in the past while Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft/Yahoo, Apple, Amazon and other information technology companies continue to outpace Google?