I’m Feeling Lucky by Douglas Edwards

I have to admit that I’m a bit of a closet Google fan, so when I got advance notice that Douglas Edwards was publishing a “behind the scenes” look at this infamous company I dropped Penguin a line and asked for a copy of the book.

At 432 pages it’s not a brief read by any means, but I enjoyed every minute of it!

Douglas Edwards was one of the first people to be employed by Google back in the day when it was just a small start up company finding its feet in the middle of the dotcom boom. Well he was employee number 59 to be exact – it says it right there on the cover!

Doug’s job was to shape the voice of Google and to help it find an identity in the real world where not everyone was a programmer and didn’t necessarily understand geek speak.

This book was a real eye opener, the view inside the Googleplex (that’s what they call Google HQ) was pretty much no holds barred and I’m quite surprised based on some of the things I learned that Google is as successful as it is today. Although actually those very same things are perhaps why Google is as successful as it is today.

You see Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of the infamous search engine, operated their business in a way completely alien to me. I spend far too many hours of my waking life in a corporate environment surrounded by rules and red tape. If you see a problem and want to fix it you can spend months going round and round in circles trying to find someone to put a tick in the right box or free up some resource.

Not at Google.

If a Googler finds a problem they’re expected to just get on and find a solution for it, whether it’s in the job description or not. In fact in the early days no one even had a job description! It was this way of working, have an idea – put it live – let the users decide whether they like it or not, that made Google the most popular search engine (I say that like I know it’s true, I think it’s true, they certainly knock the socks off every other search engine I’ve used).

Doug has documented his time at Google (1999 to 2005) in an extremely engaging and insightful book. I really feel like I got to know what it was like to be a Googler. To work in the Googleplex with it’s kitchen filled with cereals and fizzy pop and jars of jelly beans, and the games room where you could battle with your colleagues when you needed some downtime. I learned the origins behind some of Googles other great products, such as Adwords (named by Doug because it sounded like Edwards) and Gmail (the email service we all know and love but which was never actually destined for public use) of and those cute little Google Doodles that appear on our search engine to celebrate holidays and special birthdays.

There were times when I wished that I too could work in this wonderful environment. But then more often than that there were times I was grateful I didn’t. For that kitchen and games room were in use around the clock, Googlers worked through the night to complete their code and keep that search engine up and running. And Doug too, he spent many a late hour working on emails and writing copy as the voice of Google. Doug who had a wife and young children at home. As I was reading I did wonder what he really though of his “work/life balance” and whether his time at Google was worth the sacrifices he made with his family time.

Although saying that he worked at Google for just six short years, short in the general scheme of a career, and as employee 59 his stock options in that start up would have been worth a pretty penny the day it floated on the stock exchange. So maybe it was a sacrifice worth making for the long term stability of his family’s financial future.

As I say, I learned a lot from this book but not just about Google itself, I also learned some things about business and the best way to work to get things done. I dog eared a couple of pages as I was reading and here’s why.

Firstly I wanted to remember Larry’s Rules of Order. And they were:

1. Don’t delegate – if you do things yourself things happen more quickly (I have to say that I completely agree with this and it would be the way I prefer to work if only I actually had time to do everything myself!)
2. Don’t get in the way if you’re not adding value – so true, there is nothing more frustrating than people trying to get involved with what you’re doing if all they’re really doing is getting in the way.
3. Ideas are more important than age – yep, just because you’re older than me doesn’t mean my ideas are rubbish!
4. The worst thing you can do is stop someone from doing something by saying “No. Period” – this is something that I try to live by every day, sometimes in life you do have to say no, but you should really make every attempt to follow up and help find an alternative solution to the problem.

The other thing I wanted to remember was that sometimes the best solution on paper isn’t necessary the best solution. Doug learned this when sourcing a supplier for their CRM system, he carried out his due diligence and was going to give the contract to an experienced supplier. Larry on the other hand gave the contract to a start up business with a barely developed product. Why was this the better solution? Because that small start up was more than happy to base itself in the Googleplex and develop that product to custom suit Google’s needs. That would never have happened (well not unless they paid through the nose) with the established company where Google would have had to work within the realms of the off the shelf product.

I really enjoyed I’m Feeling Lucky, and whether you want to learn more about Google or just more about running a business in general then I think you will enjoy reading it too.