Are Google Interview Brainteasers Useless?

I can remember going on interviews when I was an MBA student at Harvard from 1993-1995.  Certain firms, particularly in the consulting industry, used to love using brainteasers as questions during interviews (along with the usual case interview methodology).  My first experience with such a brainteaser was the following question:  How many gas stations are there in the United States?   The questions allegedly helped the interviewer understand your thought process and your approach to solving problems.  Google, of course, became famous for using such brainteasers often during their job interviews.  One of my former students was asked at a Google interview:  "How many golf balls can you fit in this room?"  

Now, we hear from a senior executive at Google that such questions did not predict effectiveness on the job.   Here's an excerpt from an interview that the New York Times' Adam Bryant conducted with Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations at Google:

"On the hiring side, we found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time. How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane? How many gas stations in Manhattan? A complete waste of time. They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart.  Instead, what works well are structured behavioral interviews, where you have a consistent rubric for how you assess people, rather than having each interviewer just make stuff up.  Behavioral interviewing also works — where you’re not giving someone a hypothetical, but you’re starting with a question like, “Give me an example of a time when you solved an analytically difficult problem.” The interesting thing about the behavioral interview is that when you ask somebody to speak to their own experience, and you drill into that, you get two kinds of information. One is you get to see how they actually interacted in a real-world situation, and the valuable “meta” information you get about the candidate is a sense of what they consider to be difficult." 

I wonder how other firms feel about these types of brainteasers.  Will Google start a trend?  Will other firms finally ditch these silly questions?   I do think that Google's Laszlo Bok is correct - many interviewers are probably more interested in looking smart when they ask these questions, as opposed to truly learning something valuable.  One must also wonder if there's not some element of this line of thought:  "I went through this crucible; you should have to do so as well.  Let's see how you fare."  I'm sure some interviewers think this way when they consider asking one of these brainteasers.  

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Saturday Night Live: Great Sketch on Google Glass!

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Google, Motorola, and Android

When Google purchased Motorola's cellphone business, it became vertically integrated.  In other words, it now owns produces the mobile phone hardware and the software, much like Apple.   We all know that Steve Jobs extolled the benefits of vertical integration in the various businesses in which Apple competes.  He believed fervently that one could only produce a "magical" device if you made both the operating system and the hardware.  

Vertical integration has many benefits, but it also comes with certain challenges.  In particular, it can be quite challenging when you start out competing in one portion of the value chain and then enter a downstream business.  Google did so when it began by making Android and then acquired a cellphone maker.  In so doing, Google now has entered into competition with its customers.  After Google's customers for its Android software include Motorola's competitors: Samsung, HTC, and the like.  That competition with customers can be a tricky thing to navigate at times. 

According to this article in Fast Company by Farhad Manjoo, Google has chosen to deal this sticky situation by "erecting a firewall between Android and its new Motorola division. The new rules ensure that Motorola's hardware teams get no more access to Android's engineering teams than any other device maker would."   Surely, the firewall helps allay customer concerns that Google may be favoring its internal Motorola division over other cellphone makers.  On the other hand, such a firewall clearly diminishes the very benefits of vertical integration that presumably drove Google to make the deal in the first place!   What's the explanation here?  Could Google have underestimated the push-back from customers when they made the acquisition?  Or has Google chosen this firewall strategy as a temporary transition mechanism as they work through customer relationship issues?  Surely they won't leave the firewall in place forever, will they?  If so, then why buy Motorola at all?  What value does owning the hardware business bring if you don't make the software and the mobile device work together harmoniously?

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Larry Page Reforms Decision-Making at Google

Google Vice President of Operations Kristen Gil has written a terrific memo explaining how Larry Page changed decision-making at Google when he took over again last year.  Page worried that decision-making had gotten bogged down at Google, that the firm wasn't acting with the same agility as in the past.  What did Page do?  First, he outlined some new rules for how and when meetings should take place.  Here's an expert from Gil's memo: 

For starters, we noted that every decision-oriented meeting should have a clear decision-maker, and if it didn’t, the meeting shouldn’t happen. Those meetings should ideally consist of no more than 10 people, and everyone who attends should provide input. If someone has no input to give, then perhaps they shouldn’t be there. That’s okay – attending meetings isn’t a badge of honor – but the people who are attending need to get there on time. Most importantly, decisions should never wait for a meeting. If it’s critical that a meeting take place before a decision is made, then that meeting needs to happen right away.

As I wrote in a recent blog post, Alan Mullaly also changed decision-making at Ford by setting out some new ground rules for his key Thursday morning business review meetings with his senior team.  Clearly establishing new ground rules and shared norms can be very important for altering patterns of behavior that have become dysfunctional.    Page made a second change that I find even more interesting and potentially quite effective.  He recognized that, as a firm grows in size and complexity, senior executives often find themselves disconnected.  Senior teams become fragmented.   Travel schedules, meetings, and the needs of their particular units take them away from their peers.  As a result, members of the senior team do not communicate often enough.  They don't share and integrate information effectively.   Page set out to change that dynamic.   Here's another excerpt from Gil's memo:  

Besides fast decisions, another key hallmark of start-ups is their fast-paced, densely populated offices. We’ve always promoted this approach at Google, organizing around small teams and working in close proximity to one another. Even Eric Schmidt shared his office with an engineer when he first joined the company.  But as Google grew, the executives spread out to the far reaches of our campuses so they could work side-by-side with their teams. To make sure our key decision-makers could work and make decisions in an environment more reminiscent of a start-up, we created a ‘bullpen’ in one of the buildings on our main campus, which was specially designed as a place for members of our executive team to work and talk in an informal setting. These execs now set aside a number of hours per week to be there. It’s amazing how fast things can get done – even in a large company – when you put so many key people together and don’t give them an agenda.

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Does Google need an auteur?

The New York Times published an interesting article this weekend about Google and Apple. The article describes a theory outlined by blogger John Gruber at MacWorld Expo two years ago. Gruber argued that innovative firms need an auteur, someone like a film director who calls the creative shots... Like Steve Jobs does at Apple. The article suggests that Apple's auteur approach (Jobs as ultimate design arbiter) excels relative to Google's collaborative design process (many people weighing in on key choices).

I have two problems with this argument. First, I think it downplays the level of true collaboration at Apple, and discounts the true contribution of people such as Jonathan Ive. More importantly, though, I think we have to consider whether we should be generalizing based on observations of Apple. Perhaps it is a very unique firm that cannot be easily emulated. Moreover, perhaps it would be problematic to bet on the "lone genius" approach in a wide variety of other firms based on this auteur argument.

Recently, Bob Lutz made a similar argument regarding car design. He argued essentially that a dictator approach beats design by committee. However, that assumes a really capable dictator. What if the dictator is less than spectacular?

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Myths of Innovation

I discovered this good Google Talk by Scott Berkun on the Myths of Innovation:

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