Eulogizing the Google 20
The end of Google’s 20% time does not qualify as news. The only people it surprised were the sleepy folks at 3M, who’ve long wondered how Google could keep taking credit for a 3M innovation that started back in 1948.
To be fair, 3M called it 15% time. Google added 5%. Which-- in management speak-- is like an amplifier knob that goes to 11. It's one louder.
The whole thing got me thinking: If the obvious qualifies as news, then it can also qualify as commentary.
The Audacity of Bloat
There’s a bittersweet moment as any engineering company scales-- usually around the 150-employee mark-- when the builders are suddenly (and dramatically) outnumbered by the employees you need to build and manage a bureaucracy. After that, it’s only a matter of time before the Google 20% becomes little more than talent bait-- a poisonous lure for the most creative engineering minds; a recruitment tool that shamelessly sells the fiction of autonomy and self-actualization.
If that weren’t bad enough, some fear-mongering lawyers inevitably step in and frame every employee’s personal time-- nights and weekends included-- as the intellectual property of the new venture; the same kind of prima-nocta for your dreams and aspirations that Banks sneak into their employee manuals; the message very clearly being that what was good for the founder is not good for the gander.
And then finally, to top it all off, an unspoken demand is made of employees that redraw the line of work-life balance so the 80-hour work week is the new black. Yes, that demand is made at the societal level and written off as a cost of global competition but business rarely owns up to their complicity or the massive windfall it receives in free labor.
“First they came for my weeknights.”
Nazi references aside, that’s what makes the whole thing hilarious: the Google 20% is this elaborate con that gives you back 20% of the time that wasn’t the company’s to begin with.
I don’t know Paul Buchheit-- the guy who built Gmail with his Google 20%-- but if I had to guess he was probably putting in 100-hour work weeks at the time. Lawyers would disagree with me (because they have no souls) but I’d say that with hours like that, Paul-- not Google-- owns Gmail.
And in that light, the Google 20 sounds more like 40 acres and a mule. Inequity.
Perverse Faustian bargain aside, there’s still reason to mourn the death of the Google 20%.
Learning from History
I don’t want to keep writing the words “Google 20%” so I’ll anthropomorphize it and call him Steve.
Steve is what makes an engineering company great. He is-- first and foremost-- an engineer. A passionate builder. A visionary. The embodiment of the idea that science is itself an art form-- creative work that like all creative processes does not behave rationally or lend itself to structured, corporate management.
Steve is stereotypically temperamental because he’s stereotypically creative-- a caricature of himself.
He isn’t always right but-- and this is huge-- because he’s in the details-- in the code or in the silicon-- he understands better than any non-technical manager what’s possible and how quickly; where a technology’s adjacencies lie and which paths can potentially create breakthrough moments.
The difference between Steve and the clowns they’ll inevitably bring in to manage him is as stark as the difference between writing and reading, creating and consuming.
Let’s call those clowns Scullies.
The fun question to ask is “what can Sculley do with his 20%? Manage more? Meditate on the seventh, hidden sigma? Throw some imaginary numbers into a spreadsheet? Get random people on a conference call? Rank other people’s employees based on performance? Maybe look for creative clip art in Powerpoint?
The answers to this question are ultimately what drives the death of Steve.
A long time ago-- when Sculley made the move from hands-on technologist to twice-removed technologish (the executive version of someone with technical depth)-- he convinced himself that idea generation was as important as building-- that saying “let’s cure cancer” was as meaningful as curing it.
It was around the same time that he also realized that his business experience gave him the kind of strategic insight that Steve could never have.
Here’s the uncomfortable reality: the only thing that Sculley can do during his 20% is to ask Steve to stop working on Steve’s ideas and focus instead on Sculley’s.
Sculley is Management with a capital M. Hierarchical. Top-down. Corporate. If you gave him a box of Legos, he’d hire a child.
Steve is-- well-- not enough has been written about Steve to really understand him.
So when CEO Sculley gets rid of poor naive Steve in favor of “more wood behind fewer arrows,” it’s not really a newsworthy watershed moment. It’s a natural progression.
Some would even argue that it’s a symptom of scale. As companies grow larger, the Scullies of the world make sure that the Steves lose autonomy. They do it in a million different ways but the saddest is when they say -- “look, my ideas are the ones worth investing in. Yours? Well… too many arrows.” Whatever the hell that means.
Having come out of corporate America, Scullies don’t appreciate what it means to ask an engineer, a builder, a visionary to step down from the very thing he or she believed was going to change the world.
And that is worth mourning
Smart, passionate people across the world-- who weren’t lucky enough to be born independently wealthy-- are resigned to work endlessly and exclusively on the ideas of others.
The same “others” that have long since lost the ability to execute on their own lame visions.
Here’s the thing: No one that you’d want to join your company-- or that you’d want to keep as company-- would join your firm if they thought they were leaving their souls at the door.
And whether it was an elaborate con or not, the Google 20% allowed the mechanistic routines of business to have the illusion of a soul.
RIP Steve.