I eventually spotted a timeframe to read Baseline’s would-be exhaustive and really good analysis of one of the most secretive of the most famous companies worldwide: Google. The article’s entitled How Google Works, and I suggest you print it out (it’s really long) and take a look at it some day, unless you’re lying down on a beach and then it’s a perfect time.

The part I enjoyed most, since I’m a recent member of the Project Management Institute (Paris chapter), is the one providing an insight about Google’s project management internal tools. Take a look at this short extract, it’s really impressive.

“Consider how Google handles project management. Every week, every Google technologist receives an automatically generated e-mail message asking, essentially, what did you do this week and what do you plan to do next week? This homegrown project management system parses the answer it gets back and extracts information to be used for follow-up. So, next week, Merrill explains, the system will ask, “Last week, you said you would do these six things. Did you get them done?”

A more traditional project tracking application would use a form to make users plug the data into different fields and checkboxes, giving the computer more structured data to process. But instead of making things easier for the computer, Google’s approach is to make things easier for the user and make the computer work harder. Employees submit their reports as an unstructured e-mail, and the project tracking software works to “understand” the content of those e-mail notes in the same way that Google’s search engine extracts context and meaning from Web pages.

If Google employees found the project tracking system to be a hassle to work with, they probably wouldn’t use it, regardless of whether it was supposed to be mandatory, Merrill says. But because it’s as easy as reading and responding to an e-mail, “We get pretty high compliance.”

Those project tracking reports go into a repository—searchable, of course—so that managers can dip in at any time for an overview on the progress of various efforts. Other Google employees can troll around in there as well and register their interest in a project they want to track, regardless of whether they have any official connection to that project.

“What we’re looking for here is lots of accidental cross-pollination,” Merrill explains, so that employees in different offices, perhaps in different countries, can find out about other projects that might be relevant to their own work. Despite Google’s reputation for secrecy toward outsiders, internally the watchword is “living out loud,” Merrill says. “Everything we do is a 360-degree public discussion.””

By the way, Baseline Mag is a great Project Management resource for those who are keen on the subject. I also like Gantthead very much. These are my two favourites.

I took the week-end to catch up on my never ending reading list. I came upon a very interesting article in the Harvard Business Review Working Knowledge section, “Creating Strategy in an Unknowable Universe”, by Eric D. Beinhocker (the article is said to be derived from the author’s last book, The Origin of Wealth).

Eric Beinhocker, a McKinsey & Company senior advisor, makes a point in illustrating, using Bill Gates’ experience, how strategy is the ex-post outcome of the action taken in a uncertain given business environment. There can be no anticipated strategy unless all parameters are frozen, which hardly occurs in today’s fast-changing and flattening world.

Back in 1987, Bill Gates had take action against the maturation of MS-DOS and the rise of graphical user interfaces in most competitor’s R&D labs and..store shelves (ie Apple’s Mac OS).

Facing this what could’ve been an overwhelming competitive threat, Bill Gates, instead of playing the maverick focusing all Microsoft’s resources on what he thought would’ve been the very best option, chose to go for a “portfolio of experiments” – as Beinhocker brillantly put it.

Bill Gates explored 6 differents pathways, the time for him to look at how the market was reacting, slowly divesting from the experiments he saw were fruitless, and then, ex-post, focusing on what would pay off.

Here are the 6 pathways, extracted from Eric Beinhocker´s writings, although I suggest you take 10 minutes to read the full article, since it’s sincerely worth it:

1) “Microsoft continued to invest in MS-DOS”;

2) “Gates and IBM agreed to turn IBM’s OS/2 operating-system project into a joint venture”;

3) “Microsoft held discussions [...] about participating in joint efforts on Unix”;

4) “Microsoft bought a major stake in the largest seller of Unix systems on PCs”;

5) “Microsoft built its position in software for the Apple Macintosh, passing Apple itself, as the leading supplier”;

6) “Gates made major investments in Windows”.

That is a lesson of humility by Bill Gates: only God would’ve known what were the right steps to take before the market decided a few years later. And it looks as if the right decisions often come from humility. That’s what we call “common sense” – unfortunately not so common.

I found this whole little story a great example of why & how experimentation may help decision-making processes. It applies to business, but to many other fields too (diplomacy, love, charity, etc. – to French-readers, here’s a link to an article I wrote almost 2 years ago, advocating for experimenting during business and/or geopolitical negotiations in the Middle East).