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GOOGLE: a reflection of culture, leader, and management

  • Sang Kim Tran 1 , 2  

International Journal of Corporate Social Responsibility volume  2 , Article number:  10 ( 2017 ) Cite this article

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This paper provides a viewpoint of the culture and subcultures at Google Inc., which is a famous global company, and has a huge engineering staff and many talented leaders. Through its history of development, it has had positive impacts on society; however; there have been management challenges. The Board of Directors (BoDs) developed and implemented a way to measure the abilities of their managers, which helped to identify problems. This paper will analyze the case study of Harvard Business Review, Oxygen Project, and clarify the management problem in Google’s organization. It will also compare Google with Zappos, a much smaller organization, and present how the BoDs of Zappos assesses its culture and subcultures. In this paper, we will recommend eight important points to building an organizational culture that is positive for stable growth of a company. We believe that much of what be learned could be useful to other business leaders, regardless of company scale.

Introduction

In a large society, each company is considered a miniature society (Mawere 2011 ). Similar to large societies with large cultures, small societies also need to build their own cultures. A culture is influenced by many factors and determines if it is a great culture. Corporate culture requires both the attention to the efficiency of production and business and to the relationship among people in the organization closely (Bhagat et al. 2012 ). Regardless if it is a large or a small organization, it must encounter issues of cooperation among individuals and groups. There are many factors leading to the success of business process re-engineering in higher education (BPR), the main four elements are culture, processes, structure, and technology. Culture is listed as number one (Ahmad et al. 2007 ). Hence, culture becomes the most important factor to the success of the development of a business. Organizational culture is the set of shared beliefs (Steiber and Alänge 2016 ), values, and norms that influence the way members think, feel, and behave. Culture is created by means of terminal and instrumental values, heroes, rites and rituals, and communication networks (Barman n.d. ). The primary methods of maintaining organizational culture are through the socialization process by which an individual learns the values, expected behaviors, and necessary social knowledge to assume their roles in the organization. In addition, (Gupta and Govindarajan 2000 ) and Fig.  1 in (Ismail Al-Alawi et al. 2007 ) illustrates that culture was established by six major factors, such as information systems, people, process, leadership, rewarding system, and organization structure. Therefore, there is a wide variety of combined and sophisticated cultures in the workplace, especially in big corporations like Google, Facebook, Proctor & Gamble, etc. Each organization tends to have a common goal, which is to create a culture that is different from other companies and to promote their teams to be creative in developing a distinctive culture (Stimpson and Farquharson 2014 ). Clearly, we can see that Google’s culture is different than others. What makes this company unique and different from others, as well as the dominant cultures and subcultures existing at this company? How do leadership behaviors impact the organizational culture? By operating a case study of a Harvard Business Review to analyze its organizational culture, subsequently, having compared it with Zappos’ culture, this paper will clarify the similarities and differences in managing organizational cultures between them and consider whether the solutions for the problems can be applied to other business models, and for tomorrow leaders or not?

Trends of using product by information searching

Company overview

This part shows how Google became famous in the world and its culture and subcultures made it a special case for others to take into consideration. Google is one of the few technology companies which continue to have one of the fastest growth rates in the world. It began by creating a search engine that combined PageRank system, developed by Larry Page (ranking the importance of websites based on external links), and Web search engine, created by Sergey Brin (accessing a website and recording its content), two co-founders of the company (Jarvis 2011 ; Downes 2007 ). Google’s achievements absolutely do not come from any luck. Google has made extra efforts in creating an index of a number of websites, which have been up to 25 billion websites. This also includes 17 million images and one billion messages to Usenet group (Downes 2007 ). Besides searching for websites, Google users are able to search for PDF files, PostScript, documents, as well as Microsoft, Lotus, PowerPoint and Shockwave files. Google processes nearly 50% of search queries all over the world. Moreover, it is the number one search option for web users and is one of the top five websites on the Internet, which have more than 380 million users and 28 billion visits every month, and more than 50% of access from countries outside the US (Desjardins 2017 ). Google’s technology is rather special: it can analyze millions of different variables of users and businesses who place advertisements. It then connects them with millions of potential advertisements and gives messages of advertisement, which is closest to objects in less than one second. Thus, Google has the higher rate of users clicking advertisements than its opponent Yahoo, from 50 to 100%, and it dominates over 70% market share of paid advertisements (Rosenberg 2016 ). Google’s self-stated mission: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful (Alves n.d. ).” Nowadays, it is believed that people in the world like “Google” with words “the useful-lively information storage”.

Predominant culture at Google

The dominant culture in the organization depends on the environment in which the company operates the organization’s objectives, the belief system of the employees, and the company’s management style. Therefore, there are many organizational cultures (Schein 2017 ). The Exhibit 3.1 at page 39 in (Schein 2009 ) provides what culture is about. For example, employee follows a standard procedure with a strict adherence to hierarchy and well-defined individual roles and responsibilities. Those in competitive environments, such as sales may forget strict hierarchies and follow a competitive culture where the focus is on maintaining strong relationships with external parties. In this instance, the strategy is to attain competitive advantages over the competition. The collaborative culture is yet another organizational way of life. This culture presents a decentralized workforce with integrated units working together to find solutions to problems or failure.

Why do many large companies buy its innovation? Because its dominant culture of 99% defect-free operational excellence squashes any attempts at innovation, just like a Sumo wrestler sitting on a small gymnast (Grossman-Kahn and Rosensweig 2012 ). They cannot accept failures. In fact, failure is a necessary part of innovation and Google took this change by Oxygen Project to measure the abilities of their multicultural managers. This means that Google itself possesses multiple different cultures (see Google’s clips). Like Zappos, Google had established a common, organizational culture for the whole offices that are distinctive from the others. The predominant culture aimed at Google is an open culture, where everybody and customer can freely contribute their ideas and opinions to create more comfortable and friendly working environment (Hsieh 2010a ).

The fig.  2 .1 in chapter two of (Schein 2009 ) and page 17 in part one of (Schein 2017 ) provide us three levels of culture which are Artifacts, Espoused values and Underlying assumptions helping us to understand the culture at Google. At page 84, in (Schein 2009 ), the “artifacts” are identified such as dress codes, level of formality in authority relationships, working hours, meeting (how often, how run, timing), how are decisions made, communication, social events, jargon, uniforms, identity symbols, rites and rituals, disagreements and conflicts, balance between work and family . It seems that Google is quite open in these artifacts by showing a respect for uniform and national culture of each staff individually and giving them the right to wear traditional clothes.

Ad Blocking Incidence

Working at Google, employees enjoy free food served throughout the day, a volleyball court, a swimming pool, a car wash, an oil change, a haircut, free health care, and many other benefits. The biggest benefit for the staff is to be picked up on the day of work. As assessed by many traffic experts, the system set up by Google is considered to be a great transport network. Tad Widby, a project manager and a traffic system researcher throughout the United States, said: “I have not seen any larger projects in the Bay Area as well as in urban areas across the country” (Helft 2007 ). Of course, it is impossible for Google to “cover up the sky”, so Yahoo also started implementing the bus project for employees in 2005. On peak days, Yahoo’s bus also took off. Pick up about 350 employees in San Francisco, as well as Berkeley, Oakland, etc. These buses run on biofuels and have Wi-Fi coverage. Yet, Danielle Bricker, the Yahoo bus coordinator of Yahoo, has also admitted that the program is “indirectly” inspired by Google’s initiative (Helft 2007 ). Along with that, eBay recently also piloted shuttle bus transfers at five points in San Francisco. Some other corporations are also emerging ideas for treatment of staff is equally unique. Facebook is an example, instead of facilitating employees far from the workplace; it helps people in the immediate neighborhood by offering an additional $10,000 for an employee to live close to the pillar within 10 miles, nearby the Palo Alto Department (Hall 2015 ).

When it comes to Google, people often ask what the formula for success is. The answer here is the employees of Google. They create their own unique workplace culture rules to create an effective work environment for their employees. And here are the most valuable things to learn from Google’s corporate culture (Scott 2008 ) that we should know:

Tolerate with mistakes and help staff correct

At Google, paying attention to how employees work and helping them correct mistakes is critical. Instead of pointing out the damage and blaming a person who caused the mistake, the company would be interested in what the cause of the problem was and how to fix it as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Also as its culture, we understand that if we want to make breakthroughs in the workplace, we need to have experimentation, failure and repeat the test. Therefore, mistakes and failures are not terrible there. We have the right to be wrong and have the opportunity to overcome failure in the support of our superiors and colleagues. Good ideas are always encouraged at Google. However, before it is accepted and put into use, there is a clear procedure to confirm whether it is a real new idea and practical or not?

Exponential thought

Google developed in the direction of a holding company - a company that does not directly produce products or provide services but simply invest in capital by buying back capital. In the company, the criteria for setting the ten exponential function in lieu of focusing only on the change in the general increase. This approach helps Google improve its technology and deliver great products to consumers continuously.

Of course, every company wants to hire talented people to work for them. However, being talented is an art in which there must be voluntary work and enthusiasm for the work of the devotees. At page 555 in (Saffold 1988 ) illustrated that distinctive cultures dramatically influencing performance do exist. Likewise, Google, Apple, Netflix, and Dell are 40% more productive than the average company which attracts top-tier employees and high performers (Vozza 2017 ). Recognizing this impact, Google created a distinctive corporate culture when the company attracted people from prestigious colleges around the world (West 2016 ; Lazear and Gibbs 2014 ).

Build a stimulating work environment

When it comes to the elements that create creativity and innovation, we can easily recognize that the working environment is one of the most important things. Google has succeeded in building an image of a creative working. Google offices are individually designed, not duplicated in any type of office. In fact, working environment at Google is so comfortable so that employees will not think of it as a working room, with a full area of ​​work, relaxation, exercise, reading, watching movies. Is the orientation of Google’s corporate culture to stimulate creativity and to show interest in the lives of employees so that volunteers contribute freely (Battelle 2011 )?

Subculture is also a culture, but for a smaller group or community in a big organization (Crosset and Beal 1997 ). Google, known as the global company with many more offices, so there are many subcultures created among groups of people who work together, from subcultures among work groups to subcultures among ethnic groups and nations, multi-national groups, as well as multiple occupations, functions, geographies, echelons in the hierarchy and product lines. For example, six years ago, when it bought 100 Huffys for employees to use around the sprawling campus, has since exploded into its own subculture. Google now has a seven-person staff of bicycle mechanics that maintains a fleet of about 1300 brightly-colored Google bikes. The company also encourages employees to cycle to work by providing locker rooms, showers and places to securely park bikes during working hours. And, for those who want to combine meetings with bike-riding, Googlers can use one of several seven-person (Crowley 2013 ).

Leadership influences on the culture at Google

From the definition of leadership and its influence on culture; so what does leader directly influence the culture existed? According to Schein, “culture and leadership are two sides of the same coin and one cannot understand one without the other”, page three in (Schein 2009 ). If one of us has never read the article “Google and the Quest to create a better boss” in the New York Times, it is listed in a priority reading. It breaks the notion that managers have no change. The manager really makes a difference (Axinn 1988 ; Carver 2011 ). In fact, a leader has a massive impact on the culture of the company, and Google is not an exception. The leaders of Google concerned more about the demands and abilities of each individual, the study of the nature of human being, an appreciation their employees as their customers. At Google, the founders thought they could create a company that people would want to work at when creating a home-like environment. It is real that they focus on the workplace brings the comfort to staff creatively and freely (Lebowitz 2013 ).

In my opinion, a successful business cannot be attributed solely from a single star; that needs the brightness of all employees. It depends very much on the capacity and ability to attract talented people. It is the way in which the leader manages these talents, is the cornerstone of corporate culture. One thing that no one can deny is that a good leader must be a creator of a corporate culture so that the employees can maximize capabilities themselves (Driscoll and McKee 2007 ; Kotter 2008 ).

To brief, through the view of Google’s culture, BoDs tended and designed to encourage loyalty and creativity, based on an unusual organizational culture because culture is not only able to create an environment, but it also adapts to diverse and changes circumstances (Bulygo 2013 ).

Company growth and its impact

“Rearrange information around the world, make them accessible everywhere and be useful.” This was one of the main purposes set by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they first launched Google on September 4th, 1998, as a private company (Schmidt and Rosenberg 2014 ). Since then, Google has expanded its reach, stepped into the mobile operating system, provided mapping services and cloud computing applications, launched its own hardware, and prepared it to enter the wearable device market. However, no matter how varied and rich these products are, they are all about the one thing, the root of Google: online searching.

1998–2001: Focus on search

In its early years, Google.com was simply one with extreme iconic images: a colorful Google logo, a long text box in the middle of the screen, a button to execute. One button for searching and the other button are “I’m feeling lucky” to lead users to a random Google site. By May 2000, Google added ten additional languages to Google.com , including French, German, Italian, Swedish, Finnish, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Norwegian and Danish, etc. This is one of the milestones in Google’s journey into the world. Google.com is available in over 150 languages (Scott 2008 ; Lee 2017 ).

2001–2007: Interface card

A very important event with Google around this time was the sale of shares to the public (IPO). In October 2003, Microsoft heard news of the IPO, so it quickly approached Google to discuss a buyout or business deal. Nevertheless, that intention was not materialized. In 2004, it was also the time when Google held a market share of 84.7% globally through collaboration with major Internet companies, such as Yahoo, AOL, and CNN. By February 2004, Yahoo stopped working with Google and separately stood out for engine search. This has led Google to lose some market share, but it has shown the importance and distinctness of Google. Nowadays, the term “Google” has been used as a verb just by visiting Google.com and doing an online search (Smith 2010 ). Not stopping at the homepage search, Google’s interface tag began to be brought to Gmail and Calendar with the links at the top of the page. Google homepage itself continues to use this style.

In 2006, Google also made an important acquisition to buy YouTube for $1.65 billion (Burgess and Green 2013 ). However, the company decided to keep YouTube as a separate brand and not to include it in Google Video search. Thanks to the backing of an Internet industry giant, YouTube has grown to become the world’s largest online video sharing service (Cha et al. 2007 ).

2007–2012: Navigation bar, Google menu, Google now

Google began to deploy a new navigation bar located at the edge of the screen. It includes links to a place where to look for photos, videos, news, maps, as well as buttons to switch to Gmail, Calendar, and other services developed by the company. In the upper left corner, Google added a box displaying Google + notifications and user accounts’ image. Google Now not only appeared on Android and it’s also brought to Chrome on a computer as well as iOS. All have the same operating principle, and the interface card still appears as Android it is.

2013–2014: Simplified interface

Google has moved all of the icons that lead to its other applications and services to an App Drawer button in the upper right hand, at the corner of the screen. In addition, Google.com also supports better voice search through the Chrome browser. Google has experimented with other markets, such as radio and print publications, and in selling advertisements from its advertisers within offline newspapers and magazines. As of November 2014, Google operates over 70 offices over 40 countries (Jarvis 2011 ; Vise 2007 ).

2014–2017: Chrome development and facing challenges

In 2015, Google would turn HTTPS into the default. The better website is, the more users will trust search engine. In 2016, Google announced Android version 7, introduced a new VR platform called Daydream, and its new virtual assistant, Google Assistant.

Most of Google’s revenue comes from advertising (Rosenberg 2016 ). However, this “golden” business is entering a difficult period with many warning signs of its future. Google Search is the dominant strength of Google and bringing great revenue for the company. Nonetheless, when Amazon surpassed Google to become the world’s leading product in the search engine in last December, this advantage began to wobble. This is considered a fatal blow to Google when iOS devices account for 75% of their mobile advertising revenue (Rosenberg 2016 ).

By 2016, the number of people installing software to block ads on phones has increased 102% from 2015. Figure  1 illustrates that by the year’s end, about 16% of smart phone users around the world blocked their ads whilst surfing the web. These were also two groups having the most time on the Internet, high-earners and young people; however, these people have disliked ads (see Fig. 1 ).

Figure  2 shows the young people have the highest ad blocking rates. It is drawing a gloomy picture for the sustainable development of the online advertising industry in general and Google in particular. Therefore, in early 2017, Google has strategies to build an ad blocking tool, built into the Chrome browser. This tool allows users to access ads that have passed the “Coalition for Better Ads” filter so as to limit the sense of discomfort (see Fig. 2 ).

For the company impact, the history shows that speedy development of Google creates both economic and social impacts to followers in a new way of people connection (Savitz 2013 ). In this modern world, it seems that people cannot spend a day without searching any information in Google (Chen et al. 2014 ; Fast and Campbell 2004 ), a tool serves human information seeking needs. Even though when addressing this paper, it is also in need the information from Google search and uses it as a supporting tool. Nobody can deny the convenience of Google as a fast and easy way to search (Schalkwyk et al. 2010 ; Jones 2001 ; Langville and Meyer 2011 ).

Research question and methodology

In order to get the most comprehensive data and information for this case analysis, a number of methods are used, including:

Research data and collect information were mostly from the Harvard Study (Project Oxygen), which has been selected because it is related to the purpose of our study.

Data collection and analysis has been taken from Google Scholar and various websites related researches. We look at the history of appearance, development, and recognize the impacts of this company, as well as the challenges and the way the Board of Directors measures the abilities of their manager when the problem is found.

Analyzing: It was begun by considering expectations from the Harvard Study. Subsequently, considering the smaller organization (Zappos) in comparison of how its cultures and subcultures are accessed as well. Since then, the paper has clarified the management problem that Google and Zappos confront and deal with it so as to help other businesses apply this theoretical practice and achieve its goal beyond expectations.

In our paper, we mainly use the inductive method approach by compiling and describing the other authors’ theories of corporate culture, especially Google and Zappos in merging and comparing, analyzing them and making our own results.

From the aspects of the research, the questions are suggested as below:

What is the most instrumental element found from the Harvard study?

Is there any difference and similarity between a huge company and a smaller enterprise in perspective of culture and subculture?

What makes Google different from others, the dominant cultures as well as subcultures existing? How do leadership behaviors impact on the organizational culture?

How organizational culture impacts on business achievements?

The Harvard study

Project oxygen summary.

This project began in 2009 known as “the manager project” with the People and Innovation Lab (PiLab) team researching questions, which helped the employee of Google become a better manager. The case study was conducted by Garvin (2013) about a behavior measurement to Google’s manager, why managers matter and what the best manager s do. In early days of Google, there are not many managers. In a flat structure, most employees are engineers and technical experts. In fact, in 2002 a few hundred engineers reported to only four managers. But over time and out of necessity, the number of managers increased. Then, in 2009, people and team culture at Google noticed a disturbing trend. Exit interview data cited low satisfaction with their manager as a reason for leaving Google. Because Google has accessed so much online data, Google’s statisticians are asked to analyze and identify the top attributes of a good manager mentioned with an unsolved question: “Do managers matter?” It always concerns all stakeholders at Google and requires a data-based survey project called Project Oxygen to clarify employees’ concern, to measure key management behaviors and cultivate staff through communication and training (Bryant 2011 ; Garvin et al. 2013 ). Research −1 Exit Interviews, ratings, and semiannual reviews. The purpose is to identify high-scoring managers and low-scoring managers resulted in the former, less turnover on their teams, and its connection (manager quality and employee’s happiness). As for “what the best managers do”, Research-2 is to interview high and low scoring managers and to review their performance. The findings with 8 key behaviors illustrated by the most effective managers.

The Oxygen Project mirrors the managers’ decision-making criteria, respects their needs for rigorous analysis, and makes it a priority to measure impact. In the case study, the findings prove that managers really have mattered. Google, initially, must figure out what the best manager is by asking high and low scoring managers such questions about communication, vision, etc. Its project identifies eight behaviors (Bulygo 2013 ; Garvin et al. 2013 ) of a good manager that considered as quite simple that the best manager at Google should have. In a case of management problem and solution, as well as discussing four- key theoretical concepts, they will be analyzed, including formal organizational training system, how culture influences behavior, the role of “flow” and building capacity for innovation, and the role of a leader and its difference from the manager.

Formal organizational training system to create a different culture: Ethical culture

If the organizational culture represents “how we do things around here,” the ethical culture represents “how we do things around here in relation to ethics and ethical behavior in the organization” (Key 1999 ). Alison Taylor (The Five Levels of an Ethical Culture, 2017) reported five levels of an ethical culture, from an individual, interpersonal, group, intergroup to inter-organizational (Taylor 2017 ). In (Nelson and Treviño 2004 ), ethical culture should be thought of in terms of a multi-system framework included formal and informal systems, which must be aligned to support ethical judgment and action. Leadership is essential to driving the ethical culture from a formal and informal perspective (Schwartz 2013 ; Trevino and Nelson 2011 ). Formally, a leader provides the resources to implement structures and programs that support ethics. More informally, through their own behaviors, leadership is a role model whose actions speak louder than their words, conveying “how we do things around here.” Other formal systems include selection systems, policies and codes, orientation and training programs, performance management systems, authority structures, and formal decision processes. On the informal side are the organization’s role models and heroes, the norms of daily behavior, organizational rituals that support or do not support ethical conduct, the stories people tell about the organization and their implications for conduct, and the language people use, etc. Is it okay to talk about ethics? Or is ethical fading the norm?

The formal and informal training is very important. The ethical context in organizations helps the organizational culture have a tendency to the positive or negative viewpoints (Treviño et al. 1998 ). The leader should focus on providing an understanding of the nature and reasons for the organization’s values and rules, on providing an opportunity for question and challenge values for sincerity/practicality, and on teaching ethical decision-making skills related to encountered issues commonly. The more specific and customized training, the more effective it is likely to be. Google seemed to apply this theory when addressed the Oxygen Project.

How culture influences behavior

Whenever we approach a new organization, there is no doubt that we will try to get more about the culture of that place, the way of thinking, working, as well as behavior. And it is likely that the more diverse culture of a place is, the more difficult for outsiders to assess its culture becomes (Mosakowski 2004 ).

Realizing culture in (Schein 2009 ) including artifacts, espoused valued and shared underlying assumptions. It is easier for outsiders to see the artifacts (visual objects) that a group uses as the symbol for a group; however, it does not express more about the espoused values, as well as tacit assumptions. In (Schein et al. 2010 ), the author stated: “For a culture assessment to be valuable, it must get to the assumptions level. If the client system does not get to assumptions, it cannot explain the discrepancies almost always surface between the espoused values and the observed behavioral artifacts” (Schein et al. 2010 ). Hence, in order to be able to assess other cultures well, it is necessary for us to learn each other’s languages, as well as adapt to a common language. Moreover, we also need to look at the context of working, the solution for shared problems because these will facilitate to understand the culture better.

According to the OCP (Organizational Culture Profile) framework (Saremi and Nejad 2013 ), an organization is with possessing the innovation of culture, flexible and adaptable with fresh ideas, which is figured by flat hierarchy and title. For instance, Gore-Tex is an innovative product of W. L. Gore & Associates Inc., considered as the company has the most impact on its innovative culture (Boudreau and Lakhani 2009 ). Looking at the examples of Fast Company, Genentech Inc., and Google, they also encourage their employees to take challenges or risks by allowing them to take 20% of their time to comprehend the projects of their own (Saremi and Nejad 2013 ). In (Aldrich n.d. ), it is recorded that 25%–55% of employees are fully encouraged and giving a maximum value.

The famous quote by Peter Drucker , “Culture eats strategy for Breakfast” at page 67 has created a lot of interest in (Manning and Bodine 2012 ; Coffman and Sorensen 2013 ; Bock 2015 ). Despite we all know how important culture is, we have successively failed to address it (O'Reilly et al. 1991 ). The organizational research change process from the view of Schein ( 2009 ); it is a fact that whenever an organization has the intention of changing the culture, it really takes time. As we all acknowledge, to build an organizational culture, both leader and subordinate spend most of their time on learning, relearning, experiencing, as well as considering the most appropriate features. Sometimes, some changes are inevitable in terms of economic, political, technological, legal and moral threats, as well as internal discomfort (Kavanagh and Ashkanasy 2006 ; Schein 1983 ). As the case in (Schein 2009 ), when a CEO would like to make an innovation which is proved no effective response, given that he did not get to know well about the tacit implications at the place he has just come. It is illustrated that whatsoever change should need time and a process to happen (Blog 2015 ; Makhlouk and Shevchuk 2008 ). In conclusion, a new culture can be learned (Schein 1984 ), but with an appropriate route and the profits for all stakeholders should be concerned by the change manager (Sathe 1983 ).

It is true that people’s behavior managed by their types of culture (Kollmuss and Agyeman 2002 ). All tacit assumptions of insiders are not easy for outsiders to grasp the meaning completely (Schein 2009 ). It is not also an exception at any organization. Google is an example of the multicultural organization coming from various regions of the world, and the national or regional cultures making this multicultural organization with an official culture for the whole company.

In this case, the organizational culture of Google has an influence on the behaviors of manager and employee. In addition, as for such a company specializes in information technology, all engineers prefer to work on everything with data-evidence to get them involved in the meaningful survey about manager (Davenport et al. 2010 ). Eventually, Google discovered 8 good behaviors of manager, which effect to the role of “flow” also (Bulygo 2013 ; Garvin et al. 2013 ).

The role of the “flow” and building capacity for innovation

More and more people are using the term of “patient flow”. This overview describes patient flow and links to theories about flow. Patient flow underpins many improvement tools and techniques. The term “flow” describes the progressive movement of products, information, and people through a sequence of the process. In simple terms, flow is about uninterrupted movement (Nave 2002 ), like driving steadily along the motorway without interruptions or being stuck in a traffic jam. In healthcare, flow is the movement of patients, information or equipment between departments, office groups or organizations as a part of a patient’s care pathway (Bessant and Maher 2009 ). In fact, flow plays a vital role in getting stakeholders involved in working creatively and innovatively (Adams 2005 ; Amabile 1997 ; Forest et al. 2011 ). An effective ethical leader must create flow in work before transfer it to employees for changing the best of their effort to maintain, keep and develop “flow” in an engineering job, which job be easier to get stress. Definitely, Google gets it done very well.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the knowledge from my Master course, a credit of managing culture which helps me to write this paper. The author also gratefully acknowledges the helpful comments and suggestions of the reviewers and Associate Professor Khuong- Ho Van, who provided general technical help that all have improved the article.

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Tran, S.K. GOOGLE: a reflection of culture, leader, and management. Int J Corporate Soc Responsibility 2 , 10 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40991-017-0021-0

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Google Alphabet HRM, recruitment sources, methods, selection process, employee retention, information technology business case study analysis

Google’s (Alphabet’s) success is based on its high-quality human resources. The competitive qualities of the company’s employees include smartness and excellence. The information technology company’s human resource management also includes carefully selected strategies, methods, and techniques for recruitment and selection, and for the retention of high-quality workers. Recruitment practices, selection processes, and retention programs ensure an adequate workforce and retain excellent employees, who are the foundation of the business strengths noted in the SWOT analysis of Google (Alphabet) . These programs also attract employees to the firm. The company is now one of the best places to work. Such popularity and positive perception indicate the success of Alphabet’s human resource management in recruitment, selection, and employee retention.

This article is part of a series on Google’s (Alphabet’s) human resource management:

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Google’s (Alphabet’s) Recruitment Practices

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Methods . Considering the combination of internal and external recruitment sources, Google uses indirect methods and direct methods of recruitment. The indirect methods are more significant to the company. These indirect methods include advertisements on the company’s website. However, Alphabet’s human resource management also uses direct methods in the form of contacts with potential interns and future employees through academic institutions. This combination of direct and indirect recruitment methods is aligned with the mixture of internal and external recruitment sources to satisfy Google’s human resource requirements.

Selection Process at Google (Alphabet)

The most significant criteria used in Google’s human resource management for the selection of applicants are smartness, creativity, drive for excellence, and alignment with the organization. The company does not use work experience as the main criterion for selection. These criteria are based on the goal of maximizing innovation to support Google’s (Alphabet’s) generic competitive strategy and intensive growth strategies . For instance, the company’s human resource selection provides HR support for software engineering, hardware design, and consumer electronics marketing.

There are different processes used for the selection of applicants at Google. However, in general, the company’s selection process involves background checks, preliminary screening, on-the-job tests, and interviews. Google’s human resource management uses different procedures and steps for the various positions in the organization. For instance, on-the-job tests are generally used for positions that are more frequently filled through absorption of interns and trainees.

Retention Programs for Alphabet (Google) Employees

Compensation packages are the main HRM tool that the business uses for retaining high-quality human resources to fulfill the strategies and goals set in Alphabet’s (Google’s) corporate mission statement and corporate vision statement . The company’s compensation packages are competitive and above average. For example, Google provides high salaries and wages. In addition, employees get free meals and other incentives and benefits. The typical design of the company’s offices emphasizes fun and creativity, which attract and retain creative and innovative workers. Alphabet’s human resource management uses coaching and mentoring to retain and develop employees with leadership potential.

  • Alphabet Inc. – Building a Sense of Belonging at Google and Beyond .
  • Alphabet Inc. – Form 10-K .
  • Engelsberger, A., Bartram, T., Cavanagh, J., Halvorsen, B., & Bogers, M. (2023). The role of collaborative human resource management in supporting open innovation: A multi-level model. Human Resource Management Review, 33 (2), 100942.
  • Google Careers – How We Hire .
  • Gu, M., Zhang, Y., Li, D., & Huo, B. (2023). The effect of high-involvement human resource management practices on supply chain resilience and operational performance. Journal of Management Science and Engineering, 8 (2), 176-190.
  • U.S. Department of Commerce – International Trade Administration – Software and Information Technology Industry .
  • Copyright by Panmore Institute - All rights reserved.
  • This article may not be reproduced, distributed, or mirrored without written permission from Panmore Institute and its author/s.
  • Educators, Researchers, and Students: You are permitted to quote or paraphrase parts of this article (not the entire article) for educational or research purposes, as long as the article is properly cited and referenced together with its URL/link.

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From DOPMA to Google: Cyber as a Case Study in Talent Management

By David Blair, Jason Hughes, and Thomas Mashuda Joint Force Quarterly 93

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Cyber warfare operators assigned to 275th Cyber Operations Squadron of 175th Cyberspace Operations Group, Maryland Air National Guard, configure threat intelligence feed for daily watch in Hunter’s Den at Warfield Air National Guard Base, Middle River, Maryland, December 2, 2017 (U.S. Air Force/J.M. Eddins, Jr.)

T alent management is the sine qua non of an effective organization and, therefore, a critical determinant of military success. Within the framework of this article, talent management is best understood as the thinking, policy, and strategy associated with hiring, training, and retaining great people. Due to the competitive nature of combat, military organizational structure and culture must be ruthlessly functional, designed to apply the abilities and skills of the populace in order to produce dominant combat capability. If the American military cannot attract, develop, and retain the right people, producing an environment in which these people flourish, the joint force cannot expect to find success in competition below the threshold of armed conflict, major combat operations, or credible deterrence. This is a moving target, as the proverbial “right people” change over time due to changes in society and technology. Stated simply, a nation’s best military is the one that best leverages the deep strengths and best mitigates the weaknesses of that society. This is a function of both humans and hardware, requiring talent management reform and acquisitions reform, respectively, but as the special operations forces (SOF) axiom counsels, “humans are more important than hardware.” 1 If the military is to retain its competitive edge, it must master talent management, especially in relatively new enterprises such as cyberspace.

Cyber as a Case Study

Surveying our present portfolio, this challenge is most acute and pressing in the cyber community. Since the full scope of the problem exceeds the scope of any one article, talent management for cyber warriors is a manageable problem that implicates many of the larger talent management trends. A number of changes to the current industrial-era promotion and retention systems are necessary to maintain a competitive edge in cyber over the coming decades—specifically, tailored control over standards and advancement, a technical track for cyber operators, and the possibility of a cyber auxiliary force with an alternative means of accession.

To outline the challenges associated with talent management in the cyber force, this article begins by describing those challenges and continues by conducting strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threat (SWOT) analyses of the U.S. cyber status quo, the independent German “Gray Berets” cyber service model, and the Russian and Chinese lev é e en masse cyber models. From the SWOT analyses, the authors synthetically derive policy recommendations for improving cyber talent management. Ultimately, this cyber case study can provide a template for solving aspects of the larger talent management problem, especially in highly technical domains or branches.

The Current Cyber Baseline

This article assumes a general knowledge about the basic principles of the current military personnel system. As a quick review of the cyber status quo, cyber operators are subject to the same personnel system rules as the rest of the military. Of particular concern are the “up-or-out” system, the system of centralized promotion boards, and the centrally managed assignment system. These features fit well for an industrial-era assembly line bureaucracy. 2 They are ill-suited, however, to a tech company, as the case study below demonstrates, and cyber is more like a tech company than an assembly line.

Checking all the boxes to accommodate an industrial, centrally managed system is a particular problem for cyber, as the field runs at the speed of Moore’s law, and operators out of the seat for more than 6 months have to relearn much of the new “state of the art” when they return. This is incompatible with the current staff and school-in-residence model required to advance under an up-or-out system. This remains a persistent problem that will take major changes to fix and which must be coordinated with multiple stakeholders.

Running parallel to this rigid promotion structure is a monetary incentive system that functions as a force management, rather than a talent management tool. The same bonus and incentive pay templates used to retain a sufficient number of pilots and Navy nuclear Sailors to meet billet quotas have been applied to cyber forces since 2010. Such Selective Reenlistment Bonuses and Assignment Incentive Pays, adopted by the Army Cyber Mission Force in 2015, 3 are short-sighted stop-gaps at best. They assume, possibly incorrectly, that throwing money at the talent management problem will fix it. These techniques are likely unsustainable in the shadow of an ever-growing private tech sector and workforce shifting toward millennials.

Structurally, cyber operators have achieved some degree of institutional autonomy within the Services—U.S. Army Cyber Command, the 24 th Air Force and its cyber mission forces, 4 the U.S. Navy’s Tenth Fleet, and the U.S. Marine Corps Forces Cyberspace Command. 5 Moreover, the establishment of U.S. Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM) provides a warfighting platform for these forces. USCYBERCOM is following a model similar to U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), with semi-independent funding and acquisition authorities and a direct operational link to the Secretary of Defense. 6 However, like USSOCOM, even with these changes, the command will not have much control over the personnel policies and processes of its people, which remain the province of the military departments. Unfortunately, as described above, it is in these policies and processes that the talent management problem lives, not in a lack of institutional independence.

The current structure leverages extant and stable Service processes, a strength that means that cyber does not need to fund and manage a separate personnel bureaucracy. However, the impediments of the industrial-age systems still used by the Services make it difficult to compete with the market to bring in talent and to retain any talent developed organically. The current structure can take advantage of the opportunity to follow the USSOCOM pattern that, under Section 922 of the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act, gained a responsibility similar to a Service Secretary for the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict, which included new authorities for managing SOF personnel. A similar structure with similar authorities might be imagined for cyber policy elements under the Office of the Secretary of Defense. However, by continuing to rely on legacy industrial-age systems, the joint force may have to severely curtail the role of military cyber and rely on other options. 7 The better road is to recalibrate our concepts of professional military and citizen Soldiers around these new technologies.

Cyberspace operations specialists with Expeditionary Cyber Support Detachment, 782nd Military Intelligence Battalion (Cyber), provide support to training rotation for 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division, at National Training Center, Fort Irwin, California, January 13, 2019 (Steven Stover)

Civilian Model: Flexible Tech Sector Careers

American businesses in the industrial and service sector follow a model similar to the military personnel system—the legislation that scripts the military personnel system was based on best practices from these industries in the late 1970s. 8 Gather thousands of applicants, select the best on paper, train them to execute the job required, and follow the company plan for promotion. Workers are placed in an assembly line talent management program, working their way up from the bottom. This works for industrial or service companies, whose product is stable and where optimization often trumps innovation. The tech sector, specifically Google and Microsoft, manages talent in a fundamentally different way because tech-sector requirements are fast-moving targets.

Google, for example, worked to build a system that allowed exceptional talent, outside of the normal metrics of degrees or certifications, to be identified and incorporated into their system. This allows recruiters to attract young, ambitious self-starters and original thinkers to keep up with the ferocious pace of change in the tech sector. Competing for those people means understanding how to attract them. 9 One of the key aspects of the Google system is an organizational culture that encourages collaboration and individual projects—the company aspires to the concept of “20 percent time,” or the principle that employees are empowered to spend one-fifth of their working time on projects of their own initiative. Google demonstrates that in an information-age talent management system, there is a blurring of lines between recruiting, retention, and employment of talent, and quality of service works alongside quality of life both to attract the right people and to use them well.

Microsoft realized that outdated techniques of recruiting hurt its ability to attract the talent needed to succeed in today’s environment. The millennial generation and other prospective employees use technology and social networks far more than previous generations. Attracting talent requires a social recruiting strategy that leverages social networks in more fluid and interactive ways. 10 The Department of Defense (DOD) could similarly shift toward a more fluid recruiting and assignment system that leverages social networks rather than financial incentives.

Recruiting exceptional talent is the first step. Keeping the talent is next. Younger workers want to make an impact by changing the way the world lives one algorithm at a time. 11 They value this “quality of service” more than job security, which was a recruiting factor for earlier generations. Organizations had to design their culture and structure to accommodate this desire. Technical companies eschew hierarchical management structures to emphasize the individual. Google highlights that they are an organization built by engineers for engineers; this yields a structure that allows freedom on the technical side but manages their career. 12

Google established Project Oxygen, which uses analytics to develop leaders who allow technical workers to thrive in their culture. Technical experts want to be managed by those who understand their skills. Project Oxygen found that leaders who empowered the team, eschewed micromanagement, communicated with a clear vision and strategy for the team, and wielded key technical skills to advise are those best equipped to manage in a technical environment. 13

The civilian model enjoys the strength of a flexible organizational structure, not beholden to dated personnel systems, to take advantage of talent or the market. The civilian sector can provide attractive employment packages oriented toward creative incentives rather than solely compensation. For instance, Google’s commitment to 20 percent time consistently receives high reviews and results in profitable results, most notably Gmail and Google Earth. 14 Furthermore, access to worldwide talent provides ample access to sources of talent not available to the military. However, the pace and volatility of the industry is a liability that causes constant churn in the workforce. 15

Visionary leaders such as Elon Musk 16 provide what Simon Sinek calls the “why,” 17 attracting funding and talent to tackle seemingly unachievable goals. As described above, changing the world is a key attraction for tech talent. The private sector is able to leverage “lore,” openly discuss big ideas, and trumpet past accomplishments, thereby creating room for collaboration with other like-minded companies or pull “free agents” from other sectors. (Lore as an attractor is hardly foreign to the military—every high-level headquarters has a hall of honor that retells the stories of the exemplars of the command. Doing the same for cyber would require a careful navigation of security issues.) Survival in an entrepreneurial environment is only possible by maintaining an innovative spirit and the drive to solve problems.

A talented 12-year-old with access to limitless information can change the world, 18 and can threaten a company’s business model or bottom line. Google, Microsoft, and similar tech companies face threats from continuing digital transformation, advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other innovations that could fundamentally change the talent landscape. Companies that guess wrong today will find it difficult to attract a workforce needed to win in an unpredictable future. 19

This analysis reveals several key principles from the civilian sector, namely, that technical cyber operators desire to be led by those who understand their craft. Additionally, creativity is a hiring draw as well as a value producer, and the flexibility to pursue creative craft is a necessity. Finally, freedom in job placement is a stronger draw than compensation. Gaining and maintaining skill in the cyber domain for the long term require concessions from the traditional military model, especially in the form of a “technical track” option and relief from the pressures of an up-or-out system.

(From left) Alex Rice, chief technology officer and co-founder of HackerOne, Peter Kim, Air Force chief information security officer, and Chris Lynch, director of Defense Digital Service, announce “Hack the Air Force” event at HackerOne headquarters, San Francisco, April 26, 2017 (U.S. Air Force/Dan DeCook)

Independent Service: Germany’s “Gray Berets”

Germany’s Cyber and Information Space Command, colloquially known as the Gray Berets, 20 was established as the sixth German military service in April 2017. This three-star command joined the German army, navy, air force, joint support service, and joint medical service. 21 It was borne out of a real and growing concern that Germany was ill-equipped to fight future wars (and conflicts short of war) in the cyber domain. This concern was borne out as hackers targeted the Bundeswehr’s information technology (IT) infrastructure 284,000 times in the first 3 months of 2017. 22 This new cyber service is slated to garner 13,500 personnel from various IT and intelligence specialties in the existing German force. 23

The independent service model has been advocated by many military leaders, most notably Admiral James Stavridis, USN (Ret.), as a means of ensuring the operational effectiveness of U.S. cyber capabilities. 24 Since the German Cyber and Information Space Command is still in its infancy, it is difficult to say exactly how successful a separate cyber force will be at recruiting and retaining talent. However, one can still hypothesize on the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that such a force presents. Given the recency of cyber military operations, the ambitious nature of this project commends it as a model worth considering, and one whose advantages are apparent, although in the abstract, especially given the popularity of propagating services and corps in this particular historical moment.

The strengths and opportunities for talent management inherent in the German model of a separate cyber force are numerous. First, that force would be able to set its own standards for entry that could greatly increase eligibility rates within the existing talent pool. Among these are standards for age, physical fitness, and level of education. The German cyber force has already recognized this opportunity and discussed waiving certain education qualification entry requirements. 25

Second, an independent cyber force could standardize training for its members. Whereas U.S. Cyber Servicemembers receive a disparate breadth and depth of training among the Services, an autonomous cyber service could ensure its members have a common baseline. Germany has signaled its intent to do just this by instituting a cyber security master’s degree at its Bunderswehr University to train up to 70 future cyber force soldiers per year, and subsequently create an educational incentive for enlistment. 26 It will take time to determine the effectiveness of the Gray Berets’ retention practices, but increased flexibility in cyber career options should yield positive results.

Next, free from the archetypes of other services, a separate cyber force would also be able to shape its own rank structure and establish the incentives and opportunities for advancement within it. The leadership of such a force would be notionally free to establish the criteria it values among its members and then reinforce those criteria in its advancement and retention systems. This would open possibilities for a flattened rank structure similar to parts of the American tech sector, where experience and time in service do not trump knowledge and capability. Starting off from scratch would allow a cyber force to establish its own ground rules and, therefore, shape its own culture, blending the aforementioned innovative solutions implemented at Google with the already granted USCYBERCOM specific authorities, among other distinctives.

A separate cyber force is also flexible and can determine its own pace for adaptation. If the existing cyber rank, advancement, or incentive structure is stagnant or ineffective, a new one could arguably be implemented much faster than it could within one of the conventional Services. This strength is crucial in a domain that is ever-changing.

Lastly, a separate cyber force could, in theory, compete at an equal level with the other services for money and resources that could help attract talent. Such a paradigm shift would elevate cyber warriors’ priorities, where they would otherwise be buried among the other competing priorities of an individual service.

However, there are weaknesses and threats to the separate service model. While the German Cyber and Information Space Command has stated it intends to improve the salaries and career opportunities for its servicemembers, it has been slow to offer specifics, and even as a service, would be still bound to national governmental personnel laws. This is a problem in cyber, for just as the military pilot pool is directly linked to civilian demand for pilots, cyber is linked to civilian IT, which is a more volatile market than aviation. Additionally, a separate cyber force is susceptible to isolation and stovepiping, both of which are killers of innovation. At its worst, this could manifest itself in an inflexible cyber force incapable of integrating with other military disciplines or government instruments of national power. Service distinctions could also numb cyber to the personalities and needs of other services that it is meant to complement and support.

Despite its strengths, a separate cyber force is not a panacea, as it does not inherently solve the problems of talent management. While it may not be encumbered by the recruiting, retention, and advancement requirements of the existing military services, it still must compete against the private sector, which will likely still possess competitive advantages in salary and career flexibility. Moreover, relaxing entry standards could have the unintended consequence of significant personnel costs in the future, especially with regards to health care.

The independent service model reveals several key principles. First, the military cannot afford to “buy” talent against the tech sector, and must instead focus on providing meaningful missions, camaraderie, a culture of technical excellence, and unique career opportunities. Since “shoehorning” cyber warriors into legacy careers inhibits the development of this requisite unique cyber identity, a cyber force requires flexibility and some degree of autonomy in order to realize these goals. Therefore, the military should consider limited forms of institutional free rein for cyber warriors, akin to those granted USSOCOM but specific to the demands of the cyber domain.

Russian and Chinese Models

Our competitors have seen in cyber a field where they have some degree of natural advantage—namely, the field lends itself to cybernetic theories of controlling human thought and process, and these are well-trodden ground for both the Soviet and Chinese states. 27 Additionally, cyber coarsens boundaries of time and space, thereby eroding the high industrial-era walls between the civil and the military sphere. The Russian model leverages the whole of society, in several tiers, to achieve cyber effects against an adversary. This begins in the interagency and, for historical reasons, the Russian cyber enterprise is led by the Federal Security Service, or FSB (the successor of the KGB), which performs national cyber actions, including propaganda and disinformation. 28 The wealth of expertise is owned by these national agencies, and they use them in hybrid warfare, or gray zone, approaches to national policies. 29 Similar to the United States, the Russian military considered cyber more in the realm of communications until relatively recently, and Russian military cyber troops were mostly concerned with maintaining computer connectivity and security.

In 2012 Russia created the Foundation for Advanced Military Research (FAMR), a cyber-military unit focused on offensive and defensive cyber operations. Like the United States and Germany, the country has difficulties recruiting qualified cyber warriors because of the competition for more lucrative civilian options. FAMR is an effort to develop its own organic cyber capabilities in order to expand the use of cyber to support conventional military operations. 30

Until FAMR bears fruit, Russia’s current whole-of-society and outsourcing model creates significant risk. Hackers learn each time they execute a mission, but so do those who are attacked. Outsourced hacking is hard to control, and Russia may find that the hacker exceeds the desired endstate as the hacker finds they can break further into the system. No internationally recognized redline exists on cyber warfare, and each instance may lead to unpredicted consequences for the Russian government, causing kinetic or reprisal cyber warfare. 31

The good news is that “war is graded on a curve,” and the Russians seem to have similar problems with talent attraction and retention. But their national cyber is formidable, and their ability to leverage the whole of society is extremely effective. Security services own the most sensitive missions and most advanced capabilities, but a second ring of state-owned industries provides both capacity and access to the global information space. A third ring of militia-guerrilla forces allows the state to put “asks” out on the Internet to encourage individual cyber actions. While national capabilities are retained by official organizations, these “patriotic hackers” can aid and abet national efforts through everything from defacement to identifying weaknesses and entry points in systems. 32 The Chinese employed a similar concept in the wake of the 2001 EP-3 Hainan Island incident, when patriot hackers conducted distributed denial-of-service attacks and probes on U.S. military Internet sites. 33 This outer tier is unruly and cantankerous, but it is low-cost and plausibly deniable.

China, like Russia, has advanced cyber capabilities and strategies ranging from stealthy network penetration to intellectual property theft. 34 China has centralized its cyber force in the 2 nd Bureau, Unit 61398, under the 3 rd Department (SIGINT/CNO), which reports directly to the Chinese equivalent of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. 35 The People’s Liberation Army’s cyber command is fully institutionalized within the Communist Party of China (CPC) and able to draw on the resources of China’s state-owned enterprises to support its operations. The CPC is the ultimate authority in mainland China; unlike in Western societies, in which political parties are subordinate to the government, the military and government in China are subordinate to the CPC.

The centralization of action is a key factor and explains the focused targeting process directly related to China’s strategic goals, as observed by Mandiant, a leading cybersecurity firm. Organizing and directing are useless without the talent to operate in cyberspace. China launched a countrywide effort to find cyber talent, pledging to increase the number of scholarships to attract students pursuing cyber security and running special recruitment for “maverick geniuses,” which constitutes a part of nationwide efforts to train cyber security talent. 36 This effort is akin to China’s efforts to produce athletes for the Olympic games, in which it scours the countryside for the best and brightest, training athletes from a young age to bring the country glory. 37 China is working with companies to cultivate “the world’s top cyber security talent” by recruiting top graduates, both from China and overseas and from cyber contests. Traditionally, China has placed people in targeted programs based on exam scores; however, it seems that potential cyber recruits are evaluated on performance and provided practical training to hone key cyber skills. 38

The effort of cultivating and recruiting cyber talent feeds Unit 61398, which is housed in a 12-story building and staffed by hundreds to thousands of people who are trained in computer security and computer network operations, and proficient in English. The scale and duration of attacks against a wide set of industries tracked to the known location of Unit 61398 demonstrate China’s capability and capacity to execute economic, offensive, and defensive cyber operations. 39

The strength of this model is its ability to leverage the whole of interagency and society toward cyber objectives, which is a key enabler for hybrid warfare capabilities. Concentric rings of capabilities, combined with the lev é e en masse principle, allow both national forces to conduct precise attacks with the most controlled tools and guerrilla forces to conduct deniable, unpredictable hit-and-run attacks. However, in order to employ the levée en masse principle in an authoritarian country, a state must roil its people into a foment in order to yield the patriotic hackers, often exposing the government to the threat of its hackers getting out of control and going too far. They also do not need to consider the authorities’ problems in using such a model, but untangling this would be challenging.

An effective cyber model should extract this principle of multilayered civil-military cybersecurity partnerships. It should also consider the value of collaboration with industry and “cyber militias” where there are shared interests or values. However, as part of a liberal democracy, the American military must consider proper authorities, control, and civil society immunities involved in the use of force.

Commanding general of U.S. Army Research, Development, and Engineering Command tries hand at One World Terrain, March 2018 (U.S. Army)

The Policy/Strategy Mismatch

With this survey of available models complete, our analysis returns to the cyber talent management problem and identification of potential solutions. Chuck Spinney, acolyte of Colonel John Boyd, once described a “Plans/Reality Mismatch” 40 between the budgetary process and results of said process. The current talent management crisis is a symptom of a policy/strategy mismatch, as evinced by the Air Force pilot shortage, 41 our difficulties in attracting cyber talent, 42 and the myriad persistent difficulties induced by an up-or-out system as described in Tim Kane’s book Bleeding Talent . 43 The root of these problems is a generational mismatch between industrial-era human capital management systems, the hallmark of rust-belt corporations, and contemporary talent management systems such as those used in the Silicon Valley tech sector. The former focuses on transactional optimization tools, which means matching the right number of faces with the right (easily categorized) qualifications to fill all the places on the organizational chart. The latter “expects the unexpected,” embracing unique and self-identified talents, and hence it is a model uniquely suited to a creative economy. The mismatch between the creative economy and our lagging industrial-era military personnel systems drives out many of our best people. 44 In one particularly concerning turn, U.S. competitors have been able to incorporate many features similar to those used by Silicon Valley into their systems in order to optimize the same sorts of talents that a rigid industrial-age system is driving out of the U.S. Defense establishment writ large.

This problem is especially pressing in light of the Third Offset Strategy 45 efforts to leverage advanced technologies in pursuit of a new revolution in military affairs (RMA). 46 An RMA is a tectonic shift in military operations, a rapid synthesis resulting from long-term shifts in society and technology. For instance, the invention of rifles held the potential for revolution, but they could not be fully applied until nationalism allowed for major changes in distributed command and control, as manifest in the small-unit tactics used in the American Revolution. The possibilities of hardware cannot be realized without evolution on the human side of the equation. For instance, artificial intelligence (AI) is one of these key advanced technologies changing the role of the human workforce. By automating simple, repetitive tasks—the sorts of tasks that industrial systems embrace—AI is forcing humans to refocus on creative tasks, where they will still outpace machines for the foreseeable future. However, the traditional industrial-era military training and recruitment system tends to focus on processes for reproducing these repetitive tasks. Just as these technologies drove major structural changes in the civil economy, they will have to drive major changes in the military workforce in order to unlock the full potential of a fighting force increasingly composed of millennials.

Policy Recommendations

Analysis of these three models yields three design principles toward building such a force. The mission focus of the German model demonstrates the value of flexible career tracks that focus on craftsmanship. The Russian model reveals the importance of decentralization and organizational flattening, as their multilayered approach provides span and innovative tactical options. Finally, the Silicon Valley model illustrates the imperative to trust the initiative of our people, as many of the most profitable products of Google began as individual discretionary projects.

Building on these design principles, there are three recommendations that are both within the realm of the possible and within a policy-relevant timeframe. First, DOD should consider supercharging the increasing institutional independence of our cyber forces by granting increased latitude over standards and advancement for cyber operators. Second, realizing that cyber is a non-industrial, creativity-and-collaboration-driven, and extremely perishable skillset, DOD should consider a technical track for cyber operators that focuses on elite technical skills but retains the broad authorities of officers. This maps well onto Silicon Valley precedents of legendary senior coders who are disproportionately productive, as well as practices of our competitors. Finally, following the principle that cyber is part of the larger 21 st century’s “democratization of production,” the national security enterprise must consider coarsening some of the civil-military distinctions along the lines of the early Republic. A multitiered “cyber auxiliary force,” which leverages Reserve and National Guard authorities, and potentially revives constitutional “letters of marque and reprisal” authorities, brings the cyber talent of our society to bear without endangering our freedoms, providing a version of the Russian model more appropriate for a liberal democracy.

Increased Control over Standards and Advancement . No matter what system is ultimately adopted for cyber talent management, it should exert expanded influence over the standards to which members are held and their opportunities for advancement and retention. Perhaps implemented as coordinating authority with the Services, paralleling the expansion of SOF authorities, this influence would address key issues previously highlighted in the existing force structure. First, control of standards would allow recruiters to open their aperture and accept highly talented individuals who would not otherwise qualify for military service. Since cyber warriors do not need to hump miles to charge an enemy hill, the flexibility to refocus standards (within reason) on cyber-relevant requirements would prevent the loss of otherwise premier talent. 47

Next, control over advancement boards would ensure that the right qualities, qualifications, and skills are retained, independent of Service biases, as to which blocks should be checked under an up-or-out system. Control over retention tools would allow for a tailored incentive system that could overcome existing indiscriminate systems that seek to retain a body to operate a computer terminal without regard to whether that body is the most qualified. 48 Money might not always be the most effective retention tool, but it is currently the easiest tool given current processes and authorities.

Technical Track for Cyber . The Air Force is presently considering a technical track. 49 Triggered by an aircrew retention crisis, the Service is realizing that flight skills are perishable and difficult to replace and that many of those who hold them would prefer to continue to exercise them on a technical track rather than to pursue a management-style promotion career path. Such a path, as described below, would allow a branching between those who wanted to pursue and maintain proficiency and mastery of cyber tools and those who will maintain a functional knowledge but focus on managing and integrating the capability within the larger force. This is a functional split that is evident in many high-tech fields—for example, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration hires excellent engineers, and many focus their careers on honing that craft, while others go on to run the organization. One key cultural feature of this split is that one is not clearly superior to the other, but they are mutually reliant. This is a feature of the tech sector as well—few things will drive out technical talent more quickly than a technically illiterate manager dictating technical decisions to a craftsman.

In many aspects, recurring themes from the tech sector and adversary models parallel aspects of aviation and surgical culture, with high levels of value on technical mastery and collaboration, and the self-policing of performance and values. 50 In a technical track model, career operators would recognize the (to their mind, likely unenviable) role of their peers on a management track in instructional governance, and those peers would recognize the value and province of technical experts. Performance pays for technical track officers could offset these lost promotion opportunities. These technical leaders might even enjoy special privileges and opportunities, such as the standardization and evaluation roles, to further create interdependencies. Another advantage of a technical officer corps is the idea of intrinsic authority, which is a requirement for mission sets that are expected to navigate complex problems with national-level consequences, which might not have approved solutions. Given the prospect of a technical expert, deep in an enemy’s network, running a time-critical exploit, he will likely not have time to ask for guidance for all unforeseen problems and will need to make some command decisions in the course of his action. A technical officer would have the broad authorities to make these calls.

In another idea from the Air Force’s efforts to remedy its manning crisis, virtual staff tours could allow a cyber force member to remain in place at an operational assignment, gain a Pentagon phone number, email, and office symbol, and do her staff job while maintaining a basic operational currency. Any meetings that could not be done via video teleconferencing could be attended through a temporary duty assignment. This is similar to the tech sector telecommuting model, which is wildly popular in Silicon Valley.

Cyber Defense Operations Command Sailors monitor, analyze, detect, and respond to unauthorized activity within information systems and computer networks at Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek–Fort Story, Virginia, August 4, 2010 (U.S. Navy/Joshua J. Wahl)

Cyber Reserve and Auxiliary . Two fundamental options supplement our full-time cyber force: a cyber Reserve force and auxiliary cyber force that allows DOD to leverage talent when needed, while also allowing them the opportunity to continue their work in the private sector. The Reserve force model must be modified to accommodate and attract talent to support this venture.

The 2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) provides the Secretary of Defense flexibility to adjust hiring and retention of cyber personnel. 51 This provides an avenue for DOD to fundamentally change the structure for key personnel in support of the cyber mission. In many cases, Reservists who are civilian cyber professionals could do many of the same tasks for the government under a Reserve commission, which provides the authorities with what they need to execute their “wartime” mission. Placing them in an Individual Ready Reserve status where they are on-call provides access to their talents without competing with the private sector. This model is akin to keeping a lawyer on retainer for future work, and with a flexible drill days option, they could be activated to deal with an emergent problem or even if they identified a problem through their civilian work.

Change in the cyber world is accelerated; this allows key people to maintain their skills and support the private sector while also protecting the homeland from cyber attacks through their company’s day-to-day operations of defending their applications and networks. Our competitors attack both government and private-sector entities; therefore, skills need to be consistently maintained to counter the current threat. A yearly virtual drill would allow U.S. Cyber Command to test and provide updates on defense-related targets, but daily work might count as a drill given arrangements with industry. Specifically, given state-sponsored attacks against American civilian economic interests, cybersecurity industries or major corporations may often find their interests aligned with military cyber objectives. These Reservists might serve as a bridge using both Federal and corporate authorities, much as Merchant Marine officers do, whose civil and military authorities are blended and take on different flavors in war and peacetime. 52 This would require extensive ethics training and legislative clarification, but is likely a necessity against competitors who do not observe a “Cyber Geneva Convention” in differentiating military versus civil cyber infrastructure.

As a salient example, the shipping industry realized that governments were unable to completely secure sea lines of communication against piracy, thus demanding a private-sector security solution. Governments initially resisted this effort but accepted that active defense measures deployed by owners, along with insurance providers, helped deter attacks. The bottom line—the private sector filled a critical gap in protection. 53 This is the idea of “letters of marque and reprisal” discussed by cybersecurity expert and Georgetown professor Catherine Lotrionte. 54 Distinct from the Merchant Marine–analog Reserve model, this model is more like raising a militia or privateering.

Government should produce guiding principles for active cyber defense versus laws and regulations that it cannot enforce. 55 This provides a framework to leverage private solutions to defend public and private cyberspace deterring future attacks. Defensive posture operations would be managed by the private sector; however, offensive operations require a different model.

An offensive auxiliary force co-exists with the Reserve force, meaning a Reserve officer, with DOD authorities, leads a team of cyber patriots to execute offensive missions in support of our national defense. Building a national defense entity similar to “Anonymous” allows us to focus efforts and leverage talent in a nonattributable way while defending our national interests, as long as alignment with the values of a free and secure society could be ensured. This is different from the Russian model, in which they leverage hackers by placing asks in cyberspace without controlling their actions or effects, good or bad. This nationalizes the risk and creates an ability to control actions against adversaries, while allowing access to talent that may not be immediately available otherwise.

Implementation Strategy: Spiraling Authorities

To put these concepts into practice, the most promising approach is a spiral design, where each iteration can reduce risk for the next. The logical place to begin is within the authorities already granted under the current Defense Officer Personnel Management Act (DOPMA), and the most profitable of those authorities for cyber is competitive categories. Under DOPMA, placing cyber within a competitive category ensures that cyber officers will get promoted at a rate similar to their peers in other career fields. Perhaps more importantly, a competitive category means that the board for cyber officers will be calibrated to the uniqueness of their career field. Additionally, this competitive category will provide the ability to decide when boards will meet; for instance, the O4 board may meet later than other categories in order to keep cyber officers coding longer, but the O5 board may meet earlier to make up the time. The findings from this first spiral will inform follow-on actions.

Further spirals would then explore options beyond the bounds of current authorities, which would require congressional engagement. Prior to this point, the joint force should compare talent management lessons across its cyber corps, identify best practices, and then identify capability gaps. An eye to competitors would come in useful here. For instance, if the Russians are finding success in commissioning cyber forces off the street, then we may want to consider doing so as well. The second spiral would then focus on creative accessions into the current military force structure, whether readapting standards to a new archetype for cyber warfare, as Crispin Burke suggested in War on the Rocks , 56 or providing for lateral entry and options for veterans who work in cybersecurity fields, ideally with some apprenticeship and acculturation process for nonveterans. A third spiral, adjusting for conditions, might make use of “letters of marque and reprisal” and empower businesses or individuals to act as cyber-privateers in the defense of their own interests. 57

While we imagine the implementation of such a concept well off in the future, the intertwined nature of military and civilian value and capabilities in cyberspace blurs lines between civilian security and military defense, and frontier militia models might prove of use. While this third spiral would depend on the trajectory of the technology and on our competitors’ investments, we recommend opening the historical and conceptual aperture wide in seeking out appropriate models.

Cyber as the First Fruits of Talent Management

This analysis borrowed many principles from current pilot reform initiatives, and our further development of these concepts might enrich that discussion. The unprecedented distribution velocity and wide availability of information, democratization of violence (as seen in cheap and lethal quadcopters deployed by the so-called Islamic State and employed in Ukraine), and AI integration all serve to bring about a revolution in political, economic, and military affairs. Therefore, these principles, and perhaps even these polices, could be migrated toward these facets.

Still, one thing remains: humans are more important than hardware, and when considering the Third Offset Strategy, even if the joint force gets all the strategy and technology right, these will fail without the right people. With the right people and enough time, American warfighters will redeem and repair whatever strategies and technologies they are given. American society and culture powerfully apply technology to solve problems. Once again, a nation’s strongest military is the one that can best leverage these societal strengths, and this requires change in how the joint force manages and empowers talent. Warfare is a human endeavor, amplified by technology, and the U.S. military must attract and retain people who understand technology to perform it well. JFQ

1 See “SOF Truths,” available at <www.socom.mil/about/sof-truths>.

2 Max Weber, “The Essentials of Bureaucratic Organization: An Ideal-Type Construction,” in Reader in Bureaucracy , ed. Robert K. Merton et al. (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1952), 19–21.

3 Government Accountability Office (GAO), Military Compensation: Additional Actions Are Needed to Better Manage Special and Incentive Pay Programs , GAO-17-39 (Washington, DC: GAO, February 2017), available at <www.gao.gov/assets/690/682508.pdf>.

4 Kris Osborn, “Air Force to Finalize New Cyber Mission Forces,” Defense Systems, May 30, 2017, available at <https://defensesystems.com/articles/2017/05/30/air-force-cyber.aspx>.

5 See “U.S. Marine Corps Forces Cyberspace Command,” U.S. Marine Corps Concepts & Programs, available at <www.candp.marines.mil/Organization/Operating-Forces/US-Marine-Corps-Forces-Cyberspace-Command/>.

6 Personal interview, Department of Defense (DOD) Cyber Leader, fall 2017.

7 Michael V. Hayden, “The Future of Things Cyber,” in Conflict and Cooperation in Cyberspace: The Challenge to National Security , ed. Panayotis A. Yannakogeorgos and Adam B. Lowther (Boca Raton, FL: Taylor & Francis, 2013).

8 Bernard Rostker et al., The Defense Officer Personnel Management Act of 1980: A Retrospective Assessment , R-4246-FMP (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1993), available at <www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/reports/1993/R4246.pdf>.

9 Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, “How Google Manages Talent,” transcript, Harvard Business Review , September 2014, available at <https://hbr.org/2014/09/how-google-manages-talent>.

10 See “Modernizing HR at Microsoft,” June 2015, available at <https://itshowcasecontent.blob.core.windows.net/pdffiles/3723_Modernizing_HR_at_Microsoft_BCS.pdf>.

11 Michal Lev-Ram, “The Global Talent Crunch,” Fortune , September 4, 2014, available at <http://fortune.com/2014/09/04/the-global-talent-crunch/>.

12 Schmidt and Rosenberg, “How Google Manages Talent.”

13 David A. Garvin, “How Google Sold Its Engineers on Management,” Harvard Business Review , December 2013, available at <https://hbr.org/2013/12/how-google-sold-its-engineers-on-management>.

14 Vijay Govindarajan and Srikanth Srinivas, “The Innovation Mindset in Action: 3M Corporation,” Harvard Business Review , August 6, 2013, available at <https://hbr.org/2013/08/the-innovation-mindset-in-acti-3>.

15 James Kaplan, Naufal Khan, and Roger Roberts, “Winning the Battle for Technology Talent,” McKinsey & Company, May 2012, available at <www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/digital-mckinsey/our-insights/winning-the-battle-for-technology-talent>.

16 Katie Fehrenbacher, “Elon Musk’s Vision Includes New Cars, Car Sharing, and SolarCity Deal,” Fortune , July 21, 2016, available at <http://fortune.com/2016/07/20/elon-musk-master-plan-2/>.

17 Simon Sinek, “How Great Leaders Inspire Action,” video, 17.58, TEDxPuget Sound, September 2009, available at <www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action>.

18 Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, “Five Visionary Tech Entrepreneurs Who Are Changing the World,” T Magazine , October 12, 2015, available at <www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/12/t-magazine/elizabeth-holmes-tech-visionaries-brian-chesky.html>.

19 Michael Mankins, “How Leading Companies Build the Workforces They Need to Stay Ahead,” Harvard Business Review , September 6, 2017, available at <https://hbr.org/2017/09/how-leading-companies-build-the-workforces-they-need-to-stay-ahead>.

20 Tom O’Connor, “German Military Battles Foreign Hacking with New Cyber Soldiers,” Newsweek , April 5, 2017, available at <www.newsweek.com/german-military-launches-new-cyber-division-amid-russian-hacking-claims-579573>.

21 Andreas Maisch, “German Rolls Out New Cyber Defence Team,” Euractiv, December 6, 2017, available at <www.euractiv.com/section/cybersecurity/news/germany-rolls-out-new-cyber-defence-team/>.

24 James Stavridis, “Time for a U.S. Cyber Force,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 140, no. 1 (January 2014), available at <www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2014-01/time-us-cyber-force>.

25 Isabel Skierka, “Bundeswehr: Cyber Security, the German Way,” ORF, available at <www.orfonline.org/expert-speaks/bundeswehr-cyber-security-the-german-way/>.

27 Timothy Thomas, “Russia’s Reflexive Control Theory and the Military,” Journal of Slavic Military Studies 17, no. 2 (2004), 237–256.

28 Michael Connell and Sarah Vogler, Russia’s Approach to Cyber Warfare (Arlington, VA: Center for Naval Analyses, March 2017), available at <www.dtic.mil/docs/citations/AD1032208>.

31 William Haynes, “NATO’s Cyber Capabilities Are Only Defensive Without Cyber ‘Red Lines,’” Georgetown Security Studies Review , September 28, 2016, available at <http://georgetownsecuritystudiesreview.org/2016/09/28/natos-cyber-capabilities-are-only-defensive-without-cyber-red-lines/>.

32 Connell and Vogler, Russia’s Approach to Cyber Warfare .

33 Jose Nazario, “Politically Motivated Denial of Service Attacks,” in The Virtual Battlefield: Perspectives on Cyber Warfare , vol. 3, ed. Christian Czosseck and Kenneth Geers (Amsterdam: IOS Press, 2009), 163–181.

34 Ashton Carter, “Remarks to the Air Force Association,” DOD transcript, National Harbor, MD, September 16, 2015, available at <www.defense.gov/News/Speeches/Speech-View/Article/617405/remarks-to-the-air-force-association/>.

35 See “APT1: Exposing One of China’s Cyber Espionage Units,” Mandiant, February 19, 2013, available at <www.fireeye.com/content/dam/fireeye-www/services/pdfs/mandiant-apt1-report.pdf>.

36 Cao Siqi, “China Launches Cyber Security Talent Training Nationwide, Global Times (Beijing), September 20, 2016, available at <www.globaltimes.cn/content/1007158.shtml>.

37 David Barboza, “Chinese Gymnast Endured Childhood Sacrifice,” New York Times , August 5, 2008, available at <www.nytimes.com/2008/08/05/sports/05iht-gymnast.1.15012163.html>.

38 Siqi, “China Launches Cyber Security Talent Training Nationwide.”

39 “APT1: Exposing One of China’s Cyber Espionage Units.”

40 Franklin Spinney, Defense Facts of Life: The Plans/Reality Mismatch (Boulder: Westview Press, 1985).

41 “Congress Probes Military Pilot Shortage,” DOD, March 30, 2017, available at <www.defense.gov/News/Article/Article/1135200/congress-probes-military-pilot-shortage/>.

42 Jack Moore, “In Fierce Battle for Cyber Talent, Even NSA Struggles to Keep Elites on Staff,” Nextgov, April 14, 2015, available at <www.nextgov.com/cybersecurity/2015/04/fierce-battle-cyber-talent-even-nsa-struggles-keep-elites-staff/110158/>.

43 Tim Kane, Bleeding Talent: How the U.S. Military Mismanages Great Leaders and Why It’s Time for a Revolution (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

45 Robert Work, “Deputy Secretary: Third Offset Strategy Bolsters America’s Military Deterrence,” transcript, DOD, available at <www.defense.gov/News/Article/Article/991434/deputy-secretary-third-offset-strategy-bolsters-americas-military-deterrence/>.

46 N.A. Lomov, Scientific-Technical Progress and the Revolution in Military Affairs (A Soviet View) (Washington, DC: Headquarters Department of the Air Force, 1973).

47 Brian Everstine, “Is Uniformity Needed for All in Uniform?” Air Force Magazine , October 13, 2016, available at <www.airforcemag.com/DRArchive/Pages/2016/October%202016/October%2013%202016/Is-Uniformity-Needed-for-All-in-Uniform.aspx>.

48 Stavridis, “Time for a U.S. Cyber Force.”

49 Chris Busque, “Finding the Inside Track in the Race for Talent,” RAND Project Air Force, Air Force Fellows Program, April 2018; and Tom Philpott, “The Arguments Behind New Tech-Track Career Paths,” Stars and Stripes , August 20, 2015, available at <www.stripes.com/news/us/the-arguments-behind-new-tech-track-career-paths-1.363770>.

50 Geert Hofstede, Gert Jan Hofstede, and Michael Minkov, Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind , 3 rd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2010); and Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957).

51 U.S. House, National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017 , Conference Report, 114 th Cong., 2 nd sess., November 30, 2016, available at <www.congress.gov/114/crpt/hrpt840/CRPT-114hrpt840.pdf>.

52 Harold C. Hutchison, “Everything You Need to Know about the Merchant Marine,” We Are The Mighty, December 10, 2017, available at <www.wearethemighty.com/military-life/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-merchant-marine>.

53 Wyatt Hoffman and Ariel (Eli) Levite, Private Sector Cyber Defense: Can Active Measures Help Stabilize Cyberspace? (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, June 14, 2017), available at <http://carnegieendowment.org/2017/06/14/private-sector-cyber-defense-can-active-measures-help-stabilize-cyberspace-pub-71236>.

54 Catherine Lotrionte is currently Brent Scowcroft Scholar at the Atlantic Council with the Cyber Statecraft Initiative in the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security; see also “Catherine Lotrionte,” available at <www.atlanticcouncil.org/about/experts/list/catherine-lotrionte>.

55 Hoffman and Levite, Private Sector Cyber Defense .

56 Crispin Burke, “The Pentagon Should Adjust Standards for Cyber Soldiers—As It Has Always Done,” War on the Rocks , January 24, 2018, available at <https://warontherocks.com/2018/01/pentagon-adjust-standards-cyber-soldiers-always-done/>.

57 Jeremy A. Rabkin and Ariel Rabkin, “To Confront Cyber Threats, We Must Rethink the Law of Armed Conflict,” Hoover Institution, January 19, 2012.

Google's Project Oxygen: A Case-Study in Connection Culture

Michael Lee Stallard

Google recently went public with the results of its Project Oxygen research to identify the practices of Google’s best technical managers. Their approach called for a study of 100 variables by data-mining performance reviews and internal surveys. Laszlo Bock , Google’s Vice President for People Operations, summed up the findings when he said the most important factor they identified was "making that connection" between the manager and the employee. Google is right that the manager-employee connection is important, but it is only part of the story. That is what I told Google’s leaders when I presented at the Googleplex in 2009 as part of the Leading@Google Series . In 2002, I first recognized that employees who gave their best efforts and aligned their behavior with organizational goals frequently used the word "connection" to describe why they were so fired up about their work. Since that time, my colleagues and I have been identifying the multiplicity of ways that great leaders in business, government, the social sector and sports connect with the people they lead to achieve sustainable superior performance. In 2007, we published our findings about connection in the book Fired Up or Burned Out .

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After of nearly a decade of studying connection, I have come to believe it is one of the most powerful and yet least understood aspects of organizational performance. In the business context, the feeling of connection between management, employees and customers provides a competitive advantage. Unless the people who are part of a business feel a sense of connection—a bond, which promotes trust, cooperation and esprit de corps—they will never reach their potential as individual employees, nor will the organization reach its potential. [eventPDF] An organization with a high degree of connection breeds employees who are more engaged, more productive in their jobs, and less likely to leave the organization for a competitor. Organizations with greater connection also have employees who share more information with their colleagues, leading to better-informed decisions and new products, processes and entirely new businesses. Connection is what transforms a dog-eat-dog environment into a sled dog team that pulls together. So what is connection anyway? When we interact with people, we generally feel that we connect with some and not with others. Phrases such as "we really connected" and "we just didn’t connect" are common in our daily conversations. Connection describes something intangible we sense in relationships. We define connection as a bond based on shared identity, empathy and understanding that moves self-centered individuals toward group-centered membership. When connection is present, we feel energy, empathy, affirmation and are more open. When it is absent, we experience neutral or even negative feelings. Although we know what it is like to feel connected on a personal level, few among us understand the effect connection has on us and on the organizations we work in. Reflecting on my personal and professional experiences and on the research I have read and conducted made me realize three things:

  • First, connection is a powerful force that creates a positive bond between people based on both rational and emotional factors.
  • Second, connection contributes to bringing out the best in people—it energizes them, makes them more trusting and resilient to face life’s inevitable difficulties.
  • Third, connection can vary tremendously across organizations depending upon local culture and leadership.

What is it about connection that makes it so powerful? Without going too far into the psychology of connection , let me just summarize by saying simply that we are humans, not machines. We have emotions. We have hopes and dreams. We have a conscience. We have common deeply felt human needs: to be respected; to be recognized for our talents; to belong; to have autonomy or control over our work; to experience personal growth; to do work that we feel is worthwhile in a way that we feel is ethical. When we work in an environment that recognizes these realities of our human nature, we thrive. We feel more energetic, more optimistic, and more fully alive. When we work in an environment that fails to recognize this, it is damaging to our mental and physical health. For those of you who see the value of connection, I want to show you how you can bring it out in the workplace by creating a " Connection Culture "—a culture with the necessary elements to meet our human needs. The core elements of a Connection Culture that meet these human needs are vision, value, and voice.

The first element of a Connection Culture is vision . Vision exists when everyone in an organization is motivated by the organization’s mission, united by its values, and proud of its reputation. When people share a purpose or set of beliefs they’re proud of, it unites and motivates them. At Google, many employees connect with its mission to "organize the world’s information and make it accessible and usable." These Googlers understand that Google’s search engine will help change the world by making people smarter and better decision-makers . They are motivated by that prospect. Googlers are also united by its values that include "do no evil" and its "Googley" style, which incorporates the values of being authentic, genuine, fun, and curious. Being Googley ties in to Google’s passion for its modern, bright and colorful visual identity that is incorporated in everything from its website and written materials to its interior office design and building architecture. Google’s reputation connects with Googlers in several respects. The firm is well-known as one of the most innovative companies globally. It has a reputation for hiring smart people, and it is recognized for having one of the best workplaces in the world. All of this makes its talent feel proud to be associated with Google. Value The second element of a Connection Culture is that people are truly valued. My colleagues and I refer to this element in a culture simply as " value . " It means that everyone in an organization understands the universal nature of people, appreciates the unique contribution of each person, and helps them achieve their potential. Value also includes protecting people from abuses such as workplace incivility, sexual misconduct or prejudice—actions that make people feel disconnected from their community because it failed to protect them. At Google, research shows that employees feel valued if they connect with their manager. Google's Project Oxygen research picked up on some leadership behaviors that reflect value. The best technical managers help their employees with career development, take interest in employees’ lives and make time for one-on-one meetings with employees. Voice The third element of a Connection Culture is " voice ." The element of voice exists when everyone in an organization participates in an open, honest and safe environment where people share their opinions in order to understand one another and seek the best ideas. When people’s ideas and opinions are sought and considered, it helps meet the human needs for respect, recognition and belonging. "Being in the loop," so to speak, makes people feel connected to their colleagues, just as being "out of the loop" makes people feel disconnected. The CEO and founders of Google conduct " TGIF " meetings every Friday. Googlers vote on the topics they would like to see addressed in the TGIF. These meetings give employees a sense of voice that makes them feel connected. One of the variables that Project Oxygen identified was that the best technical managers ask questions and do not dictate answers. This also reflects voice.

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The bottom line is that we all need connection to thrive at work and in life. Here are a few suggestions about how to get started:

  • Everyone should understand what connection truly is and continuously strive to increase it among the people with whom they live and work.
  • Identify the vision that will unite and motivate everyone in your business. That vision may be becoming the best at what you do. It may be bringing something new to the world or conducting your business in a way that reflects your values. For example, Disney’s vision is to "make people happy." To jump start the process, get your most motivated people in a room and ask them when they have felt proud of the company. Listen to their stories and you’ll likely find a vision to rally around.
  • Get to know the personal stories of the people you live and work alongside. Learn what has made them happy and what has disappointed them. Find out what their professional and personal hopes are for the future. As people get to know one another, value will increase and connection will be strengthened.

Connection is the key . It makes a difference in families, in workplaces, in schools, in volunteer organizations, in communities and in nations. No one can thrive for long without it.

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Google Boosts its Employees’ Engagement

Case Study: How Google Boosts its Employees’ Engagement

You might have heard about this mantra: ‘happy employees produce better results.’ this is the mindset of google to keep its employees productive and satisfied. this article explains more..

Let’s say you’re a company providing software development services . If your developer’s team isn’t enthusiastic about their projects every day, you’re not going to achieve excellence. This is productivity’s power. But remember productivity is dependent on the company’s culture.

Why is everyone talking about Google’s culture or work environment? We know that Google is one of the most influential and powerful companies around the globe. The company follows a pretty well unique culture instead of corporate culture.

It has something that every big organisation needs to follow to level up their employees’ engagement or morale. The culture of any company is vital to its success and Google is perfectly right on the track.

It has one sole purpose:  Keep the employees happy and keep up the productivity.

Google has been at number ONE place from the past six years and featured on  Fortune’s  annual list of  ‘Best Companies to Work For.’  And this is not it. Google has also been named as the tech company with the best culture. (Reported by Forbes) Furthermore, Google has a 4.4 rating on  Glassdoor  based on 6000+ employees reviews.   

Google’s morale

This is what the employees of Google answered the questions asked about their work culture.

  • Acknowledged for the efforts?

Yes: 61 % Employees

Improve your employee engagement

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No: 39% Employees

  • Job Security?

Very Secure: 34 % Employees

Neutral: 19% Employees

Insecure: 8% Employees

Very insecure: 5% Employees

  • Work Environment?

Positive: 85% Employees

Negative: 15% Employees

  • Excited about going to work daily?

Yes: 80% Employees

No: 20% Employees

So, without further ado, let’s move towards the ways Google uses to boost its employees’ engagement .

“There are way easier places to work, but nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week. But if you love what you do, it (mostly) doesn’t feel like work.”- Elon Musk.

How Google Keeps Its Employees Productive And Engaged?

Exclusive perks.

Today, employees want a job in a company that makes them love what they do. Never for financial benefit or intellectual recognition. Yet instead of chance to add to the common good.

The major differentiator is to make a real difference.

Google offers different perks to its employees to show them that they are not only investing in their overall health but their future as well.

  • Chef-prepared free organic food (breakfast, lunch, and dinner);
  • Free dental and health checkup;
  • Free and unlimited dry cleaning;
  • Subsidised massages;
  • Several foosball, ping pong, video games stations;
  • On-site physicians;
  • Gyms/swimming pools memberships;
  • Free haircuts from professional hairdressers;
  • In-house nap pods;
  • Death benefits to deceased employees’ families, and;
  • Hybrid car subsidies.

Flexibility

Google has been one of the very first companies that had a vision of understanding the employees’ needs. It lets its workers have a flexible schedule so that they can work on their terms and enhance creativity and productivity. They have given their employees complete freedom to work in a way that is most suitable to them.

Knowing the employees well

Google had gone through a series of laboratory tests to figure out the productivity of their employees. They had four different experiments that included 700 participants. All the employees were treated to free drinks, fruits, and chocolates or shown a comedy movie clip.

They also enquired some of the participants about the family tragedies as a part of their assessment. After this, they found that happiness is the reason for 12% more productivity.

Google promotes an innovative and diverse organisational culture that has been a part of its employee’s life. A positive creative atmosphere and a safe working space offered by Google to its workers keep them comfortable and happy at work. The concept that being a part of Google is about being smart and wise encourages the employees to think openly and keeps them productive.

Nowadays, there are different creative coworking spaces which are known to be a perfect alternate to a workplace. These spaces are believed to deliver various advantages such as strong networking and increased engagement.

Google’s founders were researchers who had a belief in innovation and freedom of thinking. This is one of the main factors that influenced the style of Google’s leadership.

According to Brassfield, 2013, a positive leadership style stimulates inspiring and motivating employees to develop innovative ideas and inventions.

Keeping people inspired

Future Workplace, in 2017, demonstrated in a study that one of the biggest threats to employees’ engagement is employee burnout. It has also been found out that many proficient workers are often overburdened with the tasks that lead to halted innovation, incomplete work, etc.

What does Google do about keeping its employees productive, inspired, or motivated? Google’s strategy for this is  20% time . Every employee devours up to 20% of his time at work each week on ventures that inspire him.

This concept inspires employees as it allows them to concentrate on things they love or are passionate about. It can prevent burnout, decrease turnover, increase engagement.

Google tablet

Image: Pexels

Career development

Google provides an extensive professional growth program that is successful and creative and guarantees long-term performance for all the employees. The career development program of Google is one that ensures incentives are provided to employees to meet their professional and personal progression.

Google has adopted a unique way to promote the professional development of all its employees. CareerGuru  is a career coaching that provides all the details to the employees by Google’s leaders about working at a specific role in the company.

Creativity Encouragement

The companies that believe in fostering a culture of creativity have happy, satisfied, and motivated employees. Google leads the way in promoting creativity in their employees.

They are free to express their ideas as a solution to any problem. Moreover, employees are encouraged to work wherever they are comfortable in the workplace. Google has a set up where rather than just considering an applicant’s professional background, they look to recruit people who are normally inquisitive and fond of learning.

Trusting Employees

Google believes in trusting their workers because trusted employees feel more valuable. It can also boost the sense of job satisfaction and can also decrease the rate of staff turnover.

In a survey by PwC, reliable employees are 76% more engaged in their work than those in a low trusting environment. Trusted employees are happier and they have the urge to go the extra miles.

Culture based on qualitative data

Google has always been searching out different ways to optimise the performance of its employees while ensuring their happiness and satisfaction. Everything done at Google is based on real data. They use the qualitative and quantitative facts to set up processes and every single rule that is streamlined.

Google has additionally performed researches to discover how much paid time off new mothers would need and ways of building an improvised and better culture.

Fun workplace

Have you ever been allowed to design your own workstation at your company?

Probably not. But Google does it. It lets the employees design their desks or workstations.

When you see the pictures of the workplace, it seems an interesting adult play and work area and not a dull and lifeless space.

Google has always tried to push the boundaries of its workspace.

Collaboration of coworkers

At Google, the employees are urged to collaborate. They have a program called ‘Googler to Googler’ to keep them productive and promote skills such as management, public speaking, orientation, or extracurricular activities.

It is crucial to build a sense of community to create a positive culture. The company has arranged several micro kitchens around the whole workspace where coworkers can have a little chit-chat session. No one has to spend time on deciding where to eat because Google has various break-out spaces for lunch.

Google’s way of listening

Google employees have developed great software and projects that include Gmail, AdSense, Google News, etc. and all these big projects were originated because of its staff productivity approach. Google has a way of collecting employees’ feedback and listening to their suggestions that is  gDNA.

  • The employees utilise a device ‘Google Moderator’ , the result of 20% time strategy, to inquire about something and vote on inquiries of others;
  • The company holds a meeting, every Friday, where the managers react to the most famous inquiries of the week;
  • Leaders or managers utilise a charting instrument called Google-O-Meter to measure the prominence of various worker bits of advice;
  • Leaders likewise plan “Fixits” to comprehend huge, critical issues; and,
  • Fixits are 24-hour runs where team members give their full focus around discovering solutions for explicit issues.

So, can Google teach us anything?

If you are planning to adopt these learnings at your organisation just like Google keeps its employees productive, it’s essential to test the progressions first and measure the results.

It’s a great deal of work, however, the engagement advantages will make the difficult function admirably justified.

About the Author

Usman Akram is a digital marketer and SEO specialist who’s passionate about experimenting and discovering new SEO tactics and strategies to dominate search rankings while bringing an unmatched user-experience. As of now Usman is serving Buzz Interactive , a leading digital marketing agency as the head of SEO.

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A generative AI reset: Rewiring to turn potential into value in 2024

It’s time for a generative AI (gen AI) reset. The initial enthusiasm and flurry of activity in 2023 is giving way to second thoughts and recalibrations as companies realize that capturing gen AI’s enormous potential value is harder than expected .

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QuantumBlack, McKinsey’s AI arm, helps companies transform using the power of technology, technical expertise, and industry experts. With thousands of practitioners at QuantumBlack (data engineers, data scientists, product managers, designers, and software engineers) and McKinsey (industry and domain experts), we are working to solve the world’s most important AI challenges. QuantumBlack Labs is our center of technology development and client innovation, which has been driving cutting-edge advancements and developments in AI through locations across the globe.

Companies looking to score early wins with gen AI should move quickly. But those hoping that gen AI offers a shortcut past the tough—and necessary—organizational surgery are likely to meet with disappointing results. Launching pilots is (relatively) easy; getting pilots to scale and create meaningful value is hard because they require a broad set of changes to the way work actually gets done.

Let’s briefly look at what this has meant for one Pacific region telecommunications company. The company hired a chief data and AI officer with a mandate to “enable the organization to create value with data and AI.” The chief data and AI officer worked with the business to develop the strategic vision and implement the road map for the use cases. After a scan of domains (that is, customer journeys or functions) and use case opportunities across the enterprise, leadership prioritized the home-servicing/maintenance domain to pilot and then scale as part of a larger sequencing of initiatives. They targeted, in particular, the development of a gen AI tool to help dispatchers and service operators better predict the types of calls and parts needed when servicing homes.

Leadership put in place cross-functional product teams with shared objectives and incentives to build the gen AI tool. As part of an effort to upskill the entire enterprise to better work with data and gen AI tools, they also set up a data and AI academy, which the dispatchers and service operators enrolled in as part of their training. To provide the technology and data underpinnings for gen AI, the chief data and AI officer also selected a large language model (LLM) and cloud provider that could meet the needs of the domain as well as serve other parts of the enterprise. The chief data and AI officer also oversaw the implementation of a data architecture so that the clean and reliable data (including service histories and inventory databases) needed to build the gen AI tool could be delivered quickly and responsibly.

Never just tech

Creating value beyond the hype

Let’s deliver on the promise of technology from strategy to scale.

Our book Rewired: The McKinsey Guide to Outcompeting in the Age of Digital and AI (Wiley, June 2023) provides a detailed manual on the six capabilities needed to deliver the kind of broad change that harnesses digital and AI technology. In this article, we will explore how to extend each of those capabilities to implement a successful gen AI program at scale. While recognizing that these are still early days and that there is much more to learn, our experience has shown that breaking open the gen AI opportunity requires companies to rewire how they work in the following ways.

Figure out where gen AI copilots can give you a real competitive advantage

The broad excitement around gen AI and its relative ease of use has led to a burst of experimentation across organizations. Most of these initiatives, however, won’t generate a competitive advantage. One bank, for example, bought tens of thousands of GitHub Copilot licenses, but since it didn’t have a clear sense of how to work with the technology, progress was slow. Another unfocused effort we often see is when companies move to incorporate gen AI into their customer service capabilities. Customer service is a commodity capability, not part of the core business, for most companies. While gen AI might help with productivity in such cases, it won’t create a competitive advantage.

To create competitive advantage, companies should first understand the difference between being a “taker” (a user of available tools, often via APIs and subscription services), a “shaper” (an integrator of available models with proprietary data), and a “maker” (a builder of LLMs). For now, the maker approach is too expensive for most companies, so the sweet spot for businesses is implementing a taker model for productivity improvements while building shaper applications for competitive advantage.

Much of gen AI’s near-term value is closely tied to its ability to help people do their current jobs better. In this way, gen AI tools act as copilots that work side by side with an employee, creating an initial block of code that a developer can adapt, for example, or drafting a requisition order for a new part that a maintenance worker in the field can review and submit (see sidebar “Copilot examples across three generative AI archetypes”). This means companies should be focusing on where copilot technology can have the biggest impact on their priority programs.

Copilot examples across three generative AI archetypes

  • “Taker” copilots help real estate customers sift through property options and find the most promising one, write code for a developer, and summarize investor transcripts.
  • “Shaper” copilots provide recommendations to sales reps for upselling customers by connecting generative AI tools to customer relationship management systems, financial systems, and customer behavior histories; create virtual assistants to personalize treatments for patients; and recommend solutions for maintenance workers based on historical data.
  • “Maker” copilots are foundation models that lab scientists at pharmaceutical companies can use to find and test new and better drugs more quickly.

Some industrial companies, for example, have identified maintenance as a critical domain for their business. Reviewing maintenance reports and spending time with workers on the front lines can help determine where a gen AI copilot could make a big difference, such as in identifying issues with equipment failures quickly and early on. A gen AI copilot can also help identify root causes of truck breakdowns and recommend resolutions much more quickly than usual, as well as act as an ongoing source for best practices or standard operating procedures.

The challenge with copilots is figuring out how to generate revenue from increased productivity. In the case of customer service centers, for example, companies can stop recruiting new agents and use attrition to potentially achieve real financial gains. Defining the plans for how to generate revenue from the increased productivity up front, therefore, is crucial to capturing the value.

Jessica Lamb and Gayatri Shenai

McKinsey Live Event: Unlocking the full value of gen AI

Join our colleagues Jessica Lamb and Gayatri Shenai on April 8, as they discuss how companies can navigate the ever-changing world of gen AI.

Upskill the talent you have but be clear about the gen-AI-specific skills you need

By now, most companies have a decent understanding of the technical gen AI skills they need, such as model fine-tuning, vector database administration, prompt engineering, and context engineering. In many cases, these are skills that you can train your existing workforce to develop. Those with existing AI and machine learning (ML) capabilities have a strong head start. Data engineers, for example, can learn multimodal processing and vector database management, MLOps (ML operations) engineers can extend their skills to LLMOps (LLM operations), and data scientists can develop prompt engineering, bias detection, and fine-tuning skills.

A sample of new generative AI skills needed

The following are examples of new skills needed for the successful deployment of generative AI tools:

  • data scientist:
  • prompt engineering
  • in-context learning
  • bias detection
  • pattern identification
  • reinforcement learning from human feedback
  • hyperparameter/large language model fine-tuning; transfer learning
  • data engineer:
  • data wrangling and data warehousing
  • data pipeline construction
  • multimodal processing
  • vector database management

The learning process can take two to three months to get to a decent level of competence because of the complexities in learning what various LLMs can and can’t do and how best to use them. The coders need to gain experience building software, testing, and validating answers, for example. It took one financial-services company three months to train its best data scientists to a high level of competence. While courses and documentation are available—many LLM providers have boot camps for developers—we have found that the most effective way to build capabilities at scale is through apprenticeship, training people to then train others, and building communities of practitioners. Rotating experts through teams to train others, scheduling regular sessions for people to share learnings, and hosting biweekly documentation review sessions are practices that have proven successful in building communities of practitioners (see sidebar “A sample of new generative AI skills needed”).

It’s important to bear in mind that successful gen AI skills are about more than coding proficiency. Our experience in developing our own gen AI platform, Lilli , showed us that the best gen AI technical talent has design skills to uncover where to focus solutions, contextual understanding to ensure the most relevant and high-quality answers are generated, collaboration skills to work well with knowledge experts (to test and validate answers and develop an appropriate curation approach), strong forensic skills to figure out causes of breakdowns (is the issue the data, the interpretation of the user’s intent, the quality of metadata on embeddings, or something else?), and anticipation skills to conceive of and plan for possible outcomes and to put the right kind of tracking into their code. A pure coder who doesn’t intrinsically have these skills may not be as useful a team member.

While current upskilling is largely based on a “learn on the job” approach, we see a rapid market emerging for people who have learned these skills over the past year. That skill growth is moving quickly. GitHub reported that developers were working on gen AI projects “in big numbers,” and that 65,000 public gen AI projects were created on its platform in 2023—a jump of almost 250 percent over the previous year. If your company is just starting its gen AI journey, you could consider hiring two or three senior engineers who have built a gen AI shaper product for their companies. This could greatly accelerate your efforts.

Form a centralized team to establish standards that enable responsible scaling

To ensure that all parts of the business can scale gen AI capabilities, centralizing competencies is a natural first move. The critical focus for this central team will be to develop and put in place protocols and standards to support scale, ensuring that teams can access models while also minimizing risk and containing costs. The team’s work could include, for example, procuring models and prescribing ways to access them, developing standards for data readiness, setting up approved prompt libraries, and allocating resources.

While developing Lilli, our team had its mind on scale when it created an open plug-in architecture and setting standards for how APIs should function and be built.  They developed standardized tooling and infrastructure where teams could securely experiment and access a GPT LLM , a gateway with preapproved APIs that teams could access, and a self-serve developer portal. Our goal is that this approach, over time, can help shift “Lilli as a product” (that a handful of teams use to build specific solutions) to “Lilli as a platform” (that teams across the enterprise can access to build other products).

For teams developing gen AI solutions, squad composition will be similar to AI teams but with data engineers and data scientists with gen AI experience and more contributors from risk management, compliance, and legal functions. The general idea of staffing squads with resources that are federated from the different expertise areas will not change, but the skill composition of a gen-AI-intensive squad will.

Set up the technology architecture to scale

Building a gen AI model is often relatively straightforward, but making it fully operational at scale is a different matter entirely. We’ve seen engineers build a basic chatbot in a week, but releasing a stable, accurate, and compliant version that scales can take four months. That’s why, our experience shows, the actual model costs may be less than 10 to 15 percent of the total costs of the solution.

Building for scale doesn’t mean building a new technology architecture. But it does mean focusing on a few core decisions that simplify and speed up processes without breaking the bank. Three such decisions stand out:

  • Focus on reusing your technology. Reusing code can increase the development speed of gen AI use cases by 30 to 50 percent. One good approach is simply creating a source for approved tools, code, and components. A financial-services company, for example, created a library of production-grade tools, which had been approved by both the security and legal teams, and made them available in a library for teams to use. More important is taking the time to identify and build those capabilities that are common across the most priority use cases. The same financial-services company, for example, identified three components that could be reused for more than 100 identified use cases. By building those first, they were able to generate a significant portion of the code base for all the identified use cases—essentially giving every application a big head start.
  • Focus the architecture on enabling efficient connections between gen AI models and internal systems. For gen AI models to work effectively in the shaper archetype, they need access to a business’s data and applications. Advances in integration and orchestration frameworks have significantly reduced the effort required to make those connections. But laying out what those integrations are and how to enable them is critical to ensure these models work efficiently and to avoid the complexity that creates technical debt  (the “tax” a company pays in terms of time and resources needed to redress existing technology issues). Chief information officers and chief technology officers can define reference architectures and integration standards for their organizations. Key elements should include a model hub, which contains trained and approved models that can be provisioned on demand; standard APIs that act as bridges connecting gen AI models to applications or data; and context management and caching, which speed up processing by providing models with relevant information from enterprise data sources.
  • Build up your testing and quality assurance capabilities. Our own experience building Lilli taught us to prioritize testing over development. Our team invested in not only developing testing protocols for each stage of development but also aligning the entire team so that, for example, it was clear who specifically needed to sign off on each stage of the process. This slowed down initial development but sped up the overall delivery pace and quality by cutting back on errors and the time needed to fix mistakes.

Ensure data quality and focus on unstructured data to fuel your models

The ability of a business to generate and scale value from gen AI models will depend on how well it takes advantage of its own data. As with technology, targeted upgrades to existing data architecture  are needed to maximize the future strategic benefits of gen AI:

  • Be targeted in ramping up your data quality and data augmentation efforts. While data quality has always been an important issue, the scale and scope of data that gen AI models can use—especially unstructured data—has made this issue much more consequential. For this reason, it’s critical to get the data foundations right, from clarifying decision rights to defining clear data processes to establishing taxonomies so models can access the data they need. The companies that do this well tie their data quality and augmentation efforts to the specific AI/gen AI application and use case—you don’t need this data foundation to extend to every corner of the enterprise. This could mean, for example, developing a new data repository for all equipment specifications and reported issues to better support maintenance copilot applications.
  • Understand what value is locked into your unstructured data. Most organizations have traditionally focused their data efforts on structured data (values that can be organized in tables, such as prices and features). But the real value from LLMs comes from their ability to work with unstructured data (for example, PowerPoint slides, videos, and text). Companies can map out which unstructured data sources are most valuable and establish metadata tagging standards so models can process the data and teams can find what they need (tagging is particularly important to help companies remove data from models as well, if necessary). Be creative in thinking about data opportunities. Some companies, for example, are interviewing senior employees as they retire and feeding that captured institutional knowledge into an LLM to help improve their copilot performance.
  • Optimize to lower costs at scale. There is often as much as a tenfold difference between what companies pay for data and what they could be paying if they optimized their data infrastructure and underlying costs. This issue often stems from companies scaling their proofs of concept without optimizing their data approach. Two costs generally stand out. One is storage costs arising from companies uploading terabytes of data into the cloud and wanting that data available 24/7. In practice, companies rarely need more than 10 percent of their data to have that level of availability, and accessing the rest over a 24- or 48-hour period is a much cheaper option. The other costs relate to computation with models that require on-call access to thousands of processors to run. This is especially the case when companies are building their own models (the maker archetype) but also when they are using pretrained models and running them with their own data and use cases (the shaper archetype). Companies could take a close look at how they can optimize computation costs on cloud platforms—for instance, putting some models in a queue to run when processors aren’t being used (such as when Americans go to bed and consumption of computing services like Netflix decreases) is a much cheaper option.

Build trust and reusability to drive adoption and scale

Because many people have concerns about gen AI, the bar on explaining how these tools work is much higher than for most solutions. People who use the tools want to know how they work, not just what they do. So it’s important to invest extra time and money to build trust by ensuring model accuracy and making it easy to check answers.

One insurance company, for example, created a gen AI tool to help manage claims. As part of the tool, it listed all the guardrails that had been put in place, and for each answer provided a link to the sentence or page of the relevant policy documents. The company also used an LLM to generate many variations of the same question to ensure answer consistency. These steps, among others, were critical to helping end users build trust in the tool.

Part of the training for maintenance teams using a gen AI tool should be to help them understand the limitations of models and how best to get the right answers. That includes teaching workers strategies to get to the best answer as fast as possible by starting with broad questions then narrowing them down. This provides the model with more context, and it also helps remove any bias of the people who might think they know the answer already. Having model interfaces that look and feel the same as existing tools also helps users feel less pressured to learn something new each time a new application is introduced.

Getting to scale means that businesses will need to stop building one-off solutions that are hard to use for other similar use cases. One global energy and materials company, for example, has established ease of reuse as a key requirement for all gen AI models, and has found in early iterations that 50 to 60 percent of its components can be reused. This means setting standards for developing gen AI assets (for example, prompts and context) that can be easily reused for other cases.

While many of the risk issues relating to gen AI are evolutions of discussions that were already brewing—for instance, data privacy, security, bias risk, job displacement, and intellectual property protection—gen AI has greatly expanded that risk landscape. Just 21 percent of companies reporting AI adoption say they have established policies governing employees’ use of gen AI technologies.

Similarly, a set of tests for AI/gen AI solutions should be established to demonstrate that data privacy, debiasing, and intellectual property protection are respected. Some organizations, in fact, are proposing to release models accompanied with documentation that details their performance characteristics. Documenting your decisions and rationales can be particularly helpful in conversations with regulators.

In some ways, this article is premature—so much is changing that we’ll likely have a profoundly different understanding of gen AI and its capabilities in a year’s time. But the core truths of finding value and driving change will still apply. How well companies have learned those lessons may largely determine how successful they’ll be in capturing that value.

Eric Lamarre

The authors wish to thank Michael Chui, Juan Couto, Ben Ellencweig, Josh Gartner, Bryce Hall, Holger Harreis, Phil Hudelson, Suzana Iacob, Sid Kamath, Neerav Kingsland, Kitti Lakner, Robert Levin, Matej Macak, Lapo Mori, Alex Peluffo, Aldo Rosales, Erik Roth, Abdul Wahab Shaikh, and Stephen Xu for their contributions to this article.

This article was edited by Barr Seitz, an editorial director in the New York office.

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