A630.9.4RB_SeabournBeau

Does Schmidt’s description of the Google culture make sense to you?

I think that the information he spoke on does make sense to me. I personally like how there is always a 20% personal venture time. He mentioned that it protects against blow ups. I think what it does is, it actually makes the employees feel as though their ideas are welcome and that we are not just hiring you to do one thing, we want you ideas to flow through the organization. I think that there are real merits to his comments. Google has discussions where they welcome feedback that might be against their objectives. He said he asks for someone to speak against what he wants. That way productive things get accomplished.

Is this a reasonable way to view the work that most people are doing in your workplace?

This is not comparable or the way things are done here. Whenever there is a decisions made, it normally comes from a corporate level and then the managers are left to implement the change to the controllers. The controllers are just expected to adhere to whatever changes are made. The issue with that is that there is not two way communication throughout the entire organization. At this particular time, anything we say or come up with, basically will fall on deaf ears unless you're very, very persistent

As a leader, does it take courage to have and to implement this point of view?

 I think it does. I can't think of a lot of leaders that I've worked for in the past that actually like to have open discussions where they want you to find errors in their ideas/work. I personally feel that there are huge advantages to letting people have their own time to brainstorm and even bigger advantages to having people tell you where your shortcomings might be. how else can YOU learn?

Could this approach backfire?

Yes. I think what could actually happen is that someone down the line is going to think that because their idea was better than yours, they should be making the bigger decisions. You're actually opening the door for people to empowerment.You want there to be a line drawn as to each person's role and then let them know that you're the boss but you're not always right. Just because the boss is not right all the time does not mean they shouldn't be the boss.

What can you take away from this exercise to immediately use in your career?

I'm not sure how i could personally implement something like this at a controller level. I think it would take some persuading from multiple mangers to better open the communication lines and accept that people at the controller level have some unique ideas that could really benefit the company. What I'll try to do is see what kind of communication lines are in place and what our actual recruiting guidelines are. That may lead me to my next step.