[MBA China (Reuters) - Google (Google) has become the world's eyes we observe. The search giant is able to find, classify and send information instantly, playing a close role in the lives of billions of people. Every year, Google processes billions of dollars of information, accounting for 80% of the global Internet search business.
This is the gateway for humanity to share the common curiosity: I have a strange rash on my leg. Should I worry? What does Brexit mean? Who was the pitcher who won the Kansas City Royals in the seventh game of the 1985 World Series (also known as the "All-American Major Finals"?
Google shows the world to our eyes. Do you want to take a bird's eye view of your cousin's holiday home in Panama? Google. Want to know what the Lascaux rock art in France looks like? There is a Google Image search. Want to go back to the past and see the singer Prince, alias "Prince" - editorial, at the 1985 American Music Awards awards ceremony, "Purple Rain"? It can be experienced on Google's YouTube.
Google’s dominance in search has laid the foundation for a magical business based on advertising sales. Last year, its parent company, Alphabet, ranked 36th in Fortune's US 500 with $75 billion in sales, and just five years ago, the company was only ranked 92nd with sales of only $29 billion. . According to S&P Global's estimates, Alphabet's profit in 2016 will exceed $19 billion and revenue will reach $89 billion.
Over the years, Google has beaten all the challengers in the search field by continually optimizing its magical algorithms. Yahoo and Bing...sorry. As the company changes its environment, its products must also be adjusted to maintain its extraordinary ability to provide the right information to the world.
However, not long ago, the company discovered a problem that must be solved and must be solved: For a company that offers a highly diverse human experience, the technology giant itself is not a diversified office. It is changing this situation. Google decided to search its soul.
Why did you make this decision now? This may be a form of public relations, and of course it is definitely doing the right thing. (The slogan that the company used to be often ridiculed "does not do evil" probably applies to such comments.) Because of the overwhelming majority of men, the number of people of color other than Asians is extremely scarce, and Silicon Valley has been criticized in recent years.
But perhaps there is another possible factor at work: At the company's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., people are increasingly recognizing that not accepting diversity is detrimental to Google's ability to grow. To reach billions of people around the world, Google's search has yet to be optimized. How do you know how to provide better service?
In this sense, Google belongs to the latecomer. In the past few years, the business community has had a strong understanding of topics such as race, diversity and tolerance. For example, in September last year, Thomson Reuters compiled the first Diversity and Inclusion Index (D&I Index) to analyze the practice of more than 5,000 companies and finally screen out There are 100 outstanding companies. The foundation of these companies is that more and more research shows that diversified companies can create more innovative products, make customers more satisfied and achieve higher financial returns. According to Thomson Reuters, "We have found that companies that proactively build or sustain a diverse workforce often have better financial performance than their peers." Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft Companies such as Microsoft) and Cisco are among the top 25. Google is on the list.
This is not surprising. After years of boycotting, Google began its voluntary annual report on diversified employment in 2014. Although this is not a big deal in Silicon Valley, these figures show that there is a clear gap between the increasingly different markets that companies need to reach and the customers and employees who manufacture products.
These conditions have not changed much so far. According to 2016 figures, the company has approximately 46,000 employees in the United States, 71% of whom are men, 57% of whom are white, and most of the technical and leadership positions are held by men. Although Google’s Asian employees account for one-third of the total, other races are rare. The number of employees identified as Hispanic is only a little more than 5%, blacks are 2.4%, 1.8% are inter-racial mixed-races, and "other people" are less than 1%.
However, the mere disclosure of relevant information has produced a profound ripple effect. Other technology companies, such as Apple, Yahoo, and Salesforce, quickly came up with their own numbers (their proportions of their various ethnic groups are the same as Google) and began to present their own diversification commitments (see the sidebar article "Facebook: Diverse Gradually deepen?"). In the technology field that Google belongs to, other efforts have followed.
Although Google’s executives claim that change requires patience, they believe that the company’s acceptance of diversity will soon be reflected in its workforce. Google recently provided Fortune magazine with an opportunity to understand the truth of its diversified efforts, allowing employees in different departments of the company to be interviewed, technical departments, non-technical departments, and qualifications. Everyone who talks to the author believes that Google is making slow but real progress.
There is a notable phenomenon about Google's diversification movement: this is not a standard, top-down, CEO-driven action. Google is pushing resources into four areas—recruitment, inclusion, education, and community—that it believes can make an impact in these areas. However, Google’s leadership did not issue any unrealistic instructions, such as linking pay and diversification goals to show outsiders that diversification is a company’s urgent priority. The CEO and co-founder Larry Page did not issue a memo. On the contrary, Google's diversification efforts are more like a crowdsourcing work within the company, led by different Google employees in a variety of ways.
This makes some people question the seriousness of Google’s efforts. Freda Kapor Klein, co-founder of the non-profit Project Include, talks about the long-term, ambitious and well-funded projects that Alphabet has launched [such as sales that have stopped selling). Google Glass and the autonomous car that is still being developed say: "There is no such thing as a lunar exploration project. If these plans don't have access to resources and become a key project, then change the recruitment plan, release the numbers, or give A bunch of non-profit organizations don’t make it possible for them to get the results they want.â€
David Drummond, Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer of Alphabet's Corporate Development, welcomes this criticism, but he denies its premise. He is an African-American and is the actual leader of the company's internal diversification movement. He believes that the company is making real progress, but is willing to withstand external pressure. The 53-year-old Drummond said that in some ways, the diversification movement is more influential than the declaration of the lunar exploration project, because the world can immediately see the company's efforts. He said: "If you can't calmly face the problem, you will not make any progress in solving this problem. It is extremely important that we put ourselves under the outside world."
Drummond clearly remembers the day when racial consciousness broke into Googleplex. He helped launch the parade that day.
That was a Thursday in July 2014, just in the week, a jury found that George Zimmerman, a community volunteer patrol in Florida, was shooting and wearing a hoodie. The murder and manslaughter in the case of the young Trayvon Martin was not established. The case, like the "Black LivesMatter" campaign with the hashtag, sparked a hot debate on racial profiling and criminal justice throughout the United States. The jury's ruling made Google's many people of color a lot of people uneasy, and Drummond was one of them.
Dalmonds participated in various places in the company's park. Wearing a hoodie with the words "Google", he gave a speech to about 100 people through a portable loudspeaker, and then led them along the Charleston Road in Mountain View to enter the ongoing Google all. Staff weekly meeting. At the weekly meeting, Google’s executives will publicly collect questions from employees, regardless of topic. When the parade entered the venue, co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were on stage. Drummond still holds a megaphone and asks his two bosses to step down. He wants to speak. Drummond, who has been joining Google since 2002, said: "It's like an old-fashioned civil rights event. We feel that we need to be together as a company and we have succeeded."
Drummond is also a member of the company's Diversified Executive Steering Committee, and the diversity of human resources is a task he has been directly responsible for as a company executive for the past 15 years. He said: "I always have a strong sense of responsibility for diversity and feel that it is pushing us to do more."
Drummond is also deeply involved in the company's multiple non-search businesses. Since 2015, these businesses have been separated from Google and placed under the umbrella of Alphabet Holdings, including Google’s risk bets in areas such as smart home, health-enhancing technology (Verily), and home high-speed. Internet access service (Google Fiber), self-driving car (formerly a project of Google's lab Google X). He said: "These are a collection of real startups, so you have the opportunity to observe its diversity and inclusiveness from the beginning." Using his position in Alphabet, he raised questions early on. “We learned a lot from other organizations about the diversity of inclusiveness and encouraged these businesses to deal with these issues earlier.â€
Google's diversification measures are compatible and applicable to a variety of businesses, giving employees a new language to talk about diversity, rather than the language of deliberate design. About 30,000 Google employees have participated in anti-bias training and recruitment, and many employees have said that information promotion has also changed. In the search for job candidates, more and more recruiters are not limited to a few specific majors in elite universities.
Bonita Stewart is an excellent example of why new markets need new faces. Ten and a half years ago, she was hired by Google and walked out of Detroit [she was the head of Daimler Chrysler's communications department there], staying at Google's office in New York, helping the company attract car advertisers. Digital Age. Today, as the company's vice president of global partnerships, she believes that traditional media is looking for ways to make money on Google's various assets. But in that year, she was a pioneer. "To be honest, I feel in many ways that the pluralistic revolution started from me."
As a leader, she has always attached importance to vacating a vacant position and is committed to sponsoring women of color who have potential leadership. She said: "I don't want to be the only woman in this position." Now, she is urging white allies to support the genius among the colored people. Stewart said: "You have to ask them, and they are not used to being asked to do anything."
Google has a large and active group of employees who are committed to making inclusion a new normal within the company. These groups are generally divided into black, Latino (the term "Latinx" used internally by the company), Asian Americans, disabled employees and old employees (called "Greygler" by Google), etc., which represent A huge movement. Anna Patterson, a Google search product engineer and co-chairman of Women at Google, has more than 9,000 people and is still growing. She said: "Google is ready to engage in this campaign for a long time. Diversification makes technology better and products better. We need to think more deeply about each other, including mutual understanding with users."
In Drummond's view, most of the best innovation ideas may come from outside of Alphabet. This is a radical point of view. It has been criticized that the company's enabling community projects, such as the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) courses in Harlem and Oakland, are just a sense of presence. Drummond is angry with this. He said: "We do this work because it is a good thing, but we also want to know what other people are doing."
Drummond predicts that if Google employees spend more time learning about the neglected communities, they will naturally be able to understand the power of diversity. He has a friend named Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative and author of Just Mercy. When talking about the ethnic issues in the criminal justice system, Drummond quoted the friend as saying: "This is for 'grounding gas'. This is to understand what is really happening in real life, approaching the problem, and developing the Many different people contact and learn about technology products."
Talking about diversity is one thing. Google's core products are based on "network collective intelligence", but they have unearthed "collective paranoia" on the Internet. How to face this fact is another matter.
In the past two years, the company has had two things, which is the case. In 2015, a new Google image search application began to label black photos as “gorillasâ€, which caused public outrage and made the company feel embarrassed. Just last December, a British contributor to The Guardian found that when searching for information about the Nazi Holocaust, Google’s algorithm put the white racist’s denial of the Holocaust propaganda. Headline position. To make things worse, the writer solved the problem by buying ads to promote the right information.
People who question Google believe that such incidents are easy to see, and Google lacks progress in changing employee composition. But those who defend the company say that such trauma is the process of learning. Anil Dash, chief executive of Fog Creek Software in New York, said: "The will is good, the people who do the work are also very smart and have ideas." Dash is still a writer, Activist activists and advocates of inclusion. He served as a problem expert at the fourth session of the newly created Race Series Conference, Race@, "Decoding Race." Google’s program is designed to provide a candid communication platform for racial and ethnic justice issues within and outside the company.
During the gorilla incident, the head of Google Photos was Bradley Horowitz. At the Race@ event, he claimed that if the Google team was more diversified, it would be discovered earlier. According to TechCrunch, Horowitz said: "If the database is gender-discriminatory and racist, you will definitely have an algorithm that mimics these behaviors." We all live in this world, but Google's work is balanced. "We need to know what kind of data should be provided and how to correct the wrong data."
However, one of the reasons why people can remember the lesson is that this lesson has attracted the attention of the outside world: "Public pressure is 100% effective, and special reports on gorilla photos or Holocaust denials are very easy to see. To."
As long as you have enough conversations with Google employees, you can accumulate a lot of external perspectives to enrich the company's business.
The first example is 33-year-old Adriana Jara, who started working for Google in 2013. Hala was born in Costa Rica, a coffee plantation. Her earliest job was to collect morning milk from neighboring cows. But the idea of ​​Costa Rica's education system was avant-garde, and she was eventually admitted to the engineering school, and then worked on several good jobs in the country's thriving technology industry.
Then she came to Google. “There are cultural shocks in every aspect that can be imagined,†she said. Her first job was not successful. “My team’s gender is very simple, almost all male, I became a weirdo, and I can only change my position.†She said that if she could have a Spanish-speaking guide, manager or human resources contact, she would Helpful.
Today, Hara is engaged in the development of Google's shopping products. This is one of the six core teams. The background of the members is almost the same. The engineers are from China and South Korea. She said: "People are different from each other and it is much easier to get along with each other."
Hala can influence the company, there are two important areas, and she hopes to affect the third field. The first is the shopping product itself. The facts show that people's concerns are different in various Latin American economies, including Hara's motherland. She said: "In the United States, the speed of delivery is extremely important. But the infrastructure in places like Costa Rica is too poor, people are used to waiting." She pointed out that in some markets, the price is more than the choice of delivery methods. Important, the search should be adjusted and her team welcomes this.
But she is also proud of being a representative of the company, and her manager encourages and recognizes her role. At that time, a recruiter from Google walked into a university in Costa Rica where she attended and found her. Today, she has already gone several times on this journey. She went there to find job candidates and help future interns to pass challenging interviews. She has visited some girls' life camps in Peru and has established lasting relationships with the people of the international development community. The cost of these activities is borne by Google.
After some success, Hala is preparing for the third action because of Google’s long-term debt on social media, and research shows that Latin Americans in the US and elsewhere in the world are rapidly adopting social media and mobile technology. She said: "People always say that Google does not work socially. One of my dreams is to find a way to let Google go. It is said that Latinos are tempted and like to tie up, but in fact, the real social elements come to me. It is very important."
Another significant influence on Google is Michael Gardner, who works in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He has become a passionately advertised employee. At the age of 26, he worked as an accounting manager for non-profit organizations and religious organizations. Because he liked this field, he used time to expand the impact of his work. Gardner said: "The culture here is the reason why I fell in love with it."
In the summer of 2011, Gardner came to Google through a BOLD program for recruiting non-technical colored interns. He was highly praised there and took a job in the second year. He is proud of the work he has done, including improvements he has recommended for the potential customer development process for salespeople to lock small business owners. But he is also proud of him, and he has contributed several ways to improve the relationship between Google's 400 employees in the Michigan office.
Last fall, coincided with the US presidential election, Gardner led what he called "Inclusion Week". This is his own lunar exploration project. He said: "Many people have good intentions for tolerance, but they don't know how to participate." Bao Rong Zhou held a lot of lectures and focus conversations, and there were a series of moments that made people shine. Gardner hopes that these moments will help Michigan employees think more deeply about creating an inclusive workplace and sharing their experiences across the company.
The 42-year-old Jack Chen is another influential Google employee. Originally a computer scientist, he later became a patent attorney and played an important role in changing Google's perception of disabled employees. He summed it up in a very Google way: "We decided to create a team of employees around the goal of making Google the best place to work for people with disabilities." Chen was blind when he was a teenager, joining Google's New York office in 2010. He must take the lead in things like improving the office and personal skills to make him work.
Since then, Chen has worked closely with other disabled employees in Google to develop a broad and clear goal for a diverse community of people with diverse needs and challenges. He listed a list: blindness, autism, stuttering, wheelchair users, and hearing loss. He said: "There are big differences in the experiences and solutions to help these people with disabilities. The common idea is to use empathy."
There is no doubt that Google’s elitism has been extremely effective for a long time, creating enormous wealth for both employees and shareholders. With continuous optimization and technological capabilities that continue to reach magical levels, Google's search products have achieved amazing results. If it was built and maintained by a group of same-sex engineers from Stanford University, it would be difficult to achieve such success.
However, narrow tolerance also creates opportunity costs. Drummond and other Google employees can see this from a product and talent perspective. He smiled and said to me: "A lot of people have made great achievements after being rejected by Google. This does not require me to be a little bit."
But I have to name it. A well-known example is Kevin Systrom, who was rejected by the company's assistant product manager when he was working for Google on the grounds that his Stanford degree was wrong. He learned management. Science, not computer science. He left the company and founded Instagram. In 2012, he sold Instagram to Facebook for $1 billion. The value of this social media platform for sharing photos is now many times more than when it was acquired.
Laura Mather is a lesser-known but perhaps more influential technician. She may have helped Google achieve change in other ways. She was a cybersecurity expert in her early years, working first in the National Security Agency (NSA) and then moving to Silicon Valley. This experience is rare. In 2003, she became a member of eBay's first anti-fraud team. In 2006, she applied for and got a position at Google. However, according to Mather, the manager who recruited her came to Larry Page: he would give her the position, but she thought she would not succeed because her school was not good enough. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Colorado 12 years ago. "I am so sad that these two things are completely irrelevant," she said. (Page refused to comment.) Google’s interview made her equally disgusted: “They all want to prove that they are smarter than me.†Mather decided not to work for a company that wanted to suppress her.
Mather turned to co-founder of the anti-fraud startup Silver Tail Systems. The company uses pattern recognition algorithms to lock online fraud in real time. In 2012, the company was acquired by EMC/RSA for $250 million. Next, she founded a software platform called Unitive. The company is actually helping companies eliminate prejudice in hiring, allowing recruiting teams to identify candidates based on skills and values ​​rather than academic qualifications. "Whether the job seeker has played water polo at Stanford University," she said with a smile. Maybe Google should give her a job. (Fortune Chinese Network)
Image courtesy of SOURCES: GOOGLE'S EEO FILINGS (USEMPLOYEES); BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS.
Image courtesy of SOURCES: GOOGLE'S EEO FILINGS (USEMPLOYEES); BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS.
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