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Google Comes to Class

Leaving your job and coming to business school is both an exciting and scary step for MBA students. For most it means going through the recruiting process again and for a subset of those it means doing some serious soul searching first. But no matter which category you fit into, some companies manage to grab everyone’s attention when they come to campus. These companies not only have strong brand names but they also have passionate employees that work on some of the world’s most cutting edge problems.  Well, last week, I had the privilege of seeing one of those companies firsthand, as Google came to speak in my Leading and Organizing Media Companies course.

One of the best things about coming to a top business school like Kellogg, is that there’s no dearth of great companies and speakers on campus. On any given day, there’s ten different companies on campus and just as many executive level speakers. This is good for MBA students who may not know where they want to work when they graduate and it’s even better for the students interested in learning more about the business world more broadly.

After spending a few months here on campus, it’s clear that investment banks and consulting firms are still popular choices.  But at Kellogg, so are other function and industries, like general management, marketing, CPG, internal strategy, and the technology industry.

Of the those listed above, the technology industry tends to be a favorite here at Kellogg, so my class was quite fortunate and happy to have  three folks from Google pay a visit.

During class we talked about the overall state of the company. We discussed issues such as the current job market, how to get a job at Google, and Google’s evolving business model. We also dove into the company’s People and Human Resources Strategies as well as talked a little about Google’s history and plans for the future. And finally, our professor budgeted in about thirty minutes for questions.

One interesting fact I learned from the event is that Google receives about 7,000 applications per day. As you might imagine, I was quite shocked at the number, so my natural reaction was to ask a few questions in return – how many of those are viable candidates, how do those viable candidates get filtered, and do some people ever slip through the holes?

I also asked questions about Google’s culture and whether that culture is evolving over time as many people have the perception that Google is becoming a big company.  Google had a lot of great answers last week and in one response they said that they still consider their culture to be a unique competitive advantage, and that they consider themselves to still be more like a start up, so are still looking for more entrepreneurial applicants.

On the other hand, they also admitted that the company is reaching a pivotal moment in history. It currently has more employees than it’s ever had before and it’s reaching a new segment of its company life cycle, so has to start managing its growth differently. One way Google has done that is by keeping its hand in a lot of interesting areas, for example in helping create the self driving cars (click here to see article on cars)

But perhaps more interesting (and more relevant) than the long list of vastly interesting things Google is involved in is the fact that the company maintains a relentless focus on the Google mission. The representatives not only referred back to the mission on multiple occasions but they also stressed that it’s important to keep that at the very core of what they do.

And that’s pretty interesting, right. After all, most of us think more of nonprofits when we think of mission statements because those are what inspires founders to create the organization and they’re what drive board members and volunteers to stay involved.

But for Google, having a mission statement and a set of associated values is critical.  And as a result, today Google remains like a highly driven entrepreneurial community of people despite it’s increasing size. And having a community with a shared purpose, and a habit of collaborating and sharing information will not only help Google reach new heights for years to come, but it may also help them to change the world.

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