Fortune magazine's latest cover is devoted to Google, the current media darling, and whether it's a one-hit wonder. So where does chaos come in?
To figure the place out, I've repeatedly been told the person to see is Shona Brown, the 40-year-old ex-McKinsey consultant who is Google's senior vice president for business operations. That's what it says on her business card, anyway, but she might as well be Google's chief chaos officer. She literally wrote the book on the subject, a 1998 bestseller called "Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos."
And later:
The company's goal, says Brown, is to determine precisely the amount of management it needs -- and then use a little bit less. It's an almost laughably Goldilocksian approach that Brown also advocates in her book, co-written with a Stanford business professor. The way to succeed in "fast-paced, ambiguous situations," she tells me, is to avoid creating too much structure, but not to add too little either. In other words, just make it not too hot and not too cold, and you're done. "If I ever come into the office and I feel comfortable, if I don't feel a little nervous about some crazy stuff going on, then we've taken it too far," she says.
Not that this solves Google's basic problem:
What concerns investors is whether Google can come up with a second act. There's nothing to suggest that its growth engine -- ad-supported search -- is in trouble. But it's clear from Google's tentative lurches into new forms of advertising and its spaghetti method of product development (toss against wall, see if sticks) that the company is searching for ways to grow beyond that well-run core.
