But the thing is, it wasn't just a motto, but part of Google's internal culture that promoted and enabled employee empowerment, that was actually promoted in
How Google Works by then-CEO Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg:
"He (Eric Schmidt) was in a meeting in which they were debating the merits of a change to the advertising system, one that had the potential to be quite lucrative for the company. One of the engineering leads pounded the table and said, "We can't do that, it would be evil." The room suddenly got quiet; it was like a poker game in an old Western, when one player accuses another of cheating and everyone else backs away from the table, waiting for someone to draw. Eric thought, Wow, these guys take these things seriously. A long, sometimes contentious discussion followed and ultimately the change did not go through.
When Toyota invented its famous kanban system of just-in-time production, one of its quality control rules was that any employee on the assembly line could pull the cord to stop production if he noticed a quality problem. That same philosophy lies behind our simple three-word slogan. When the engineer in Eric's meeting called the proposed new feature "evil", he was pulling the cord to stop production, forcing everyone to assess the proposed feature and determine if it was consistent with the company's values. Every company needs a "Don't be evil," a culteral lodestar that shines over all management layers, product plans, and office-politics
In fact, those passages are part of an entire chapter on principles for empowering employees, which the book argues is important because empowered employees drive the innovation that made Google a large company. But obviously this isn't the Google of yesteryear. Where before one employee could force discussion and organizational soul-searching over a profitable but 'evil' change, now
thousands of employees are apparently powerless to pull the cord on Project Maven, to the effect that several have quit the company over it. If anything, it seems the change better reflects the company that Google is now.
I think that at some point organizations grow so large that they're beyond our ability to effectively enforce principles or values, especially when those principles interfere with an organization's primary reason for being...in the case of a company, usually to make money for its shareholders. I don't think the top brass at Alphabet, Google, or most companies are mustache-twirling villains scheming to stomp on their employees and customers alike, I just think their companies have grown so large that they can't possibly maintain a corporate culture that's counter to the foundation of what a corporation is, and in Google's case it was finally better to admit as much rather than be mocked and ridiculed with their own motto.
As evidenced by my owning
How Google Works and having read many other books about the company, I'm actually a fan of Google's earlier corporate culture, and I use the book as a reference sometimes on how to proceed with things here in Wintreath. But I would guess if Wintreath itself had hundreds of thousands of staff even we would have trouble maintaining our community principles. It's just how organizations are as they grow beyond any one person or group's ability to manage.
