Shr Google Case

Google Case

Louisa Li

Nicholas Southard

Yin Zhang

Afif El-Sohr

Rob Quinn

1.

Strategic leadership is a rare attribute to come by, but it is what sets successful companies apart from unsuccessful ones. The six actions of a strategic leaders involve creating a vision, developing a management team, managing the resource portfolio, build an entrepreneurial culture, promote integrity and ethics, and use effective control. The three primary individuals that are responsible for Google’s success are Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, and Sergey Brin.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page are the original founders of Google. They established their mission statement: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. The vision of Google is to create a perfect search engine (Greg, 2009). Brin and Page created clear, objective, and plausible mission and vision statements that add value to their company.

Google’s top management trio owned roughly 1/3 of share but control over 80% of votes. This immunized Brin, Page, and Schmidt from replacement by investors second-guessing the company’s strategy. This is a negative effect of their leadership because it did not take into consideration maximizing shareholder’s wealth and focused on their own instead (Google case, p 5).

Sergey and Larry created an entrepreneurial culture within Google, which is highly correlated with their success. Schmidt includes in his golden rules to encourage creativity – They have a mailing address that employees send ideas to and can rate in discussion groups other coworkers’ ideas and are allocated 20% of their time to develop their own ideas and projects (several successful products have been conceived because of this including Google News).

Google emphasizes that they will not sacrifice integrity for quality. The two founders along with Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt have promoted integrity since the start of their company. The company manifesto clearly states, “It...