The Biz of Coding

Don’t be Evil! – What the motto originally meant in Google

by Ujwal Tickoo on March 14th, 2006

(This post continues from my previous post: Don’t be Evil!: How big brands manage to hide truth from consumers.)

It is interesting to review the context in which the famous Don’t Be Evil Google motto was adopted. I quote John Battelle from his brilliant account in “The Search” (a book on how Google and its rivals have shaped and influenced Internet Search and the business world): (Bold text in the quoted passage is done by me for emphasis)

“The founders asked Stacy Sullivan, then head of Google’s human resources, to round up a cross section of early employees with the mission of elucidating Google’s core values….That’s when Paul Buchheit…blurted out what would become the most important three words in Google’s corporate history….It became a cultural rallying call at Google, initially for how Googlers should treat each other, but quickly for how Google should behave in the world as well….Defining evil seems pretty simple when you’re sitting in a conference room of a small but growing Internet company in 2001…Don’t be Evil is a wonderful sentiment for describing the ethical boundaries of internal company dealings, but when your business is understood to be a global arbiter of human knowledge and commerce, sticking to such a principled stand can become extremely…tricky.
Not to mention that it smacked of arrogance – who were these Googlers anyway, and what right did they have to determine what was evil and what was good?”

Evidently the “Don’t be Evil” motto was primarily an internal standard of behavior set by Googlers for Googlers when the company was small. It is quite understandable that a small group of talented people would embrace the standard of Don’t Be Evil at their work place. Many intelligent and productive people in a small fast-growing company would wish to preserve their work ethic as their company grows — free of the (standard big-business) suffocations of politics, infighting, and inadequate-results producing narrow-minded agendas.

The motto swelled-up in Googlers collective consciousness and soon avatared as Google’s business philosophy for the treacherously competitive business world. The Google PR machine didn’t realize the dangers of preaching such an impossible and misleading business motto. It whipped up a Love-Google frenzy that lead several tech-enthusiasts and media-folks to buy-in Piper Jaffray & Co.’s predictions that Google’s stock will touch US $ 600 by 2006 end. All this when no financial projections were offered by Google itself!

post 3 of 4 To continue…

POSTED IN: Branding, Google, Internet, John Battelle