Macalua.com

Three excellent pieces on the Google culture by Ben Elgin of BusinessWeek.com.

The Mind of Google’s Resident Muse

The biggest obstacle facing (Marissa) Mayer and her peers will be conveying a sense of empowerment to Google’s engineers and product managers. Over the years, many of Google’s biggest products have bubbled up from the personal pet projects of its engineers. These include everything from Google News to its desktop search product, to Google’s social-networking offering, known as Orkut.

But as Google’s ranks swell, convincing techies that they can have just as big of an impact will take work. “It’s hard to imagine what it would be like to walk in and start at Google today,” Mayer says. “How can you convey that sense of empowerment?”

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Google’s Search for Simplicity

Google’s no-frills, fast-loading site has been key to its growing popularity among Internet searchers, particularly as rivals vastly improve their own search technologies.

But it also poses a dilemma for Google: How can it draw attention to its many new products without cluttering the site and turning off its core constituency of searchers?

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Managing Google’s Idea Factory

A large part of (Marissa) Mayer’s success at Google is due to her ability to travel easily between different worlds. When she first joined, the company had something of a high-school cliquishness, albeit in reverse. At lunch, the coolest kids — in this forum, the smartest geeks — sat together. On the periphery, sales and marketing folks gathered. Mayer could hold her own in either realm. “She’s a geek, but her clothes match,” says one former employee.

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