Google: Codifying Values and Culture

How do think about culture and maintaining culture, as you are scaling a high-growth business?

It’s really hard work. There is lots of material out there on how great companies do this. I’ve been fortunate in working in places that do this incredibly well. Google, where I worked for six years, had an incredibly strong culture and went to great lengths to build that into the way we did things. For me, personally, I learnt a lot from that.

The sort of things I learnt from Google were, they codified their culture. They didn’t just let it happen to them. They wrote it down, they had values and principles that were very carefully thought through and were talked about often inside the organization and were very public, inside the company. We used those values to hire people and to reward people.

I think that’s a really important part of what companies need to do, as they scale. Be clear about what your values are; don’t just let it happen to you. Document them and communicate them, regularly. But the most difficult thing to do is to have a leadership team that actually follow the values and whose behaviors embody them. That is something that is really challenging, to call people out where their behaviors are inconsistent with the values. As a leadership group, you need to be working on that all the time.