Let 1,000 Flowers Blossom

“‘You can't understand Google unless you know that both Larry and Sergey were Montessori kids,’ said Marissa Mayer. ‘Montessori’ refers to schools based on the educational philosophy of Maria Montessori, an Italian physician born in 1870 who believed that children should be allowed the freedom to pursue what interested them.”

So begins the “Don’t Be Evil” portion of Steven Levy’s landmark biography, In The Plex.

One of the distinctive characteristics of Google’s organizational culture is that folks are given autonomy to tackle problems that seem interesting to them. This Montessori-eque belief in freedom explains many of the company’s policies. It’s the value that underlies the practice of giving every employee one day per week to pursue project of interest (known as “20% time”).

This same attitude of allowing folks freedom to pursue interesting projects has resulted in unexpected success and breakthrough. One example that struck me in the book is the development of AdSense, which now generates more than $10,000,000,000 annually (I like to write the zeroes out on very big numbers):

“Brin wanted to launch a pilot version quickly and have the full program running by May. Google didn't even have a payment system in place to distribute the commissions to publishers. The only thing close to such an in-house scheme was the method used in a search backwater called Google Answers, and ill-fated experiment that let users bypass algorithms for tough queries and instead solicit answers from anonymous fellow users, who would be paid small sums for satisfactory responses. The new project used that payment system.”

That’s not to say that AdSense was a consensus direction among Googlers:

“A large number of people thought it was a really bad thing to spend our talents on,” said Georges Harik, a top engineer and one of Google’s first ten employees.

But what I love about the story is 1) that Larry and Sergey allowed key employees to explore areas of interest despite not having consensus support from the organization, and 2) that when the project reached a critical capability gap, it was filled by an otherwise-failed and largely-abandoned experiment, which just so happened to have developed a key piece of technology.

Neither of these things would have happened had Google not subscribed to the theory of “Let A Thousand Flowers Blossom.”

Related: Willing To Go Off-Road

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