Google's problem isn't Chat GPT...

The thing about icebergs which I’ve always found fascinating, is that as big as they might seem on the surface, what lurks beneath the surface is often much, much larger.

That’s probably the way I would look at Google’s Chat GPT challenge.

The past few weeks / months have not been kind to Google.? Massive layoffs, the company’s first in their history, and also a host of bad press around their failure to anticipate yet alone effectively counter Chat GPT have taken their toll.??

But the problem I believe goes way beyond Chat GPT .? The problem lies in the company’s culture - or better said, what’s happened to it.

This weekend for example, the company lauded its new Pixel 7 commercial featuring NBA superstars and a very cool functionality - namely the ability to erase people or objects from your pictures.

Cool? Yes.? Groundbreaking no.? Worse, phone companies have been touting improvements to the camera for what feels like decades.? Is the functionality neat? Sure, but how many people are going to switch phones over that?? Would someone actually leave the iOS ecosystem for it?

On another point, let’s take Chrome for instance.? The market leading browser.? I live on chrome.? I have every password I can imagine on it and it’s my gateway to everything online.??

The problem.? Chrome is a memory hog.? I have a Macbook that’s barely a year old and sometimes it slows down because I have too many tabs open.? Or worse, nearly every single day when I shut down my laptop there is one app that stops the process because it crashes:? Chrome.??

Let’s switch to docs.? Many of us work remotely.? Many of us work across borders, cultures and languages.? For years I prayed for docs to give me a cool, simple and powerful functionality to translate my English seamlessly into Spanish or another language.??

Docs does translate but you have to translate the entire document which opens a separate doc, and another Chrome tab (yeah!) and frankly, it’s not even that good.

So I use DeepL .? A 3rd party app which is on the Web and has a Mac App.? Not only is the translation better and much faster but Deepl also has a Chrome extension that allows me to instantly translate my text in near perfect form in any language in nearly any space where I can write text (in my CRM, emails, you name it).

Why doesn’t Chrome do that?

Lastly, Google Play .? This one is close to my heart since it was my team that created and launched the brand back in 2011.? I opened the store today for maybe the first time in 3 years, because like many consumers I’m happy with the apps I have and Google doesn’t really market to me or give me any kind of real incentive to discover new apps (sorry app devs but I’m probably not your target audience anyway).??

I open play and what do I see?? Ads.? Ads everywhere.? I almost laughed because I suggested we add ads to the play store back in 2012 but was overruled because the Godfather of Android hated the idea.? Now I feel like I see more ads than games or apps.

But the bigger problem isn’t the ads.? It’s the apps and games I see.? Few of them really speak to me and I’m certain that given the millions of apps on the Play store there MUST be some good ones out there that I would at least like to try.

But it seems that with all the data Google has on me using Search, Chrome (sadly), YouTube and Docs, every single day for the past 12 years, they haven’t found a way to develop a solution that might actually surface something useful to drag me kicking and screaming back to the play store.

So what’s the pattern here?? All these changes are iterative.? None of this stuff feels revolutionary and exciting.? There’s no real risk taking.? There are aren’t any moonshots that might take these products from good to great.

And that is a culture problem.

Google’s culture used to be its greatest asset.? Their innovation, technical genius, transparency, use of OKR’s and need to be Googley encouraged people to think big, take big risks and fail fast.

What happened?

I’m not sure.? I left the company more than 10 years ago but what I can say, as someone who radically changed careers and spent the past 3 years writing Step Back and LEAP, a book about personal transformation and change, is that Google has become too complacent and comfortable.

Most people don’t change when they’re comfortable.? That’s simply human nature.??

And who wouldn’t when you have a monopoly on search, browsers, online video and Android app distribution?? Just keep piling on the cash and make shareholders happy.? Why take risks?

After I left play in 2012 I kept in touch with many Googlers.? Not one of them told me to come back.? In fact most of my team later left play and half left Google.? They claimed the company had become too slow, too bureaucratic and that getting anything done was like Chinese water torture.

I’m not sure it’s gotten better.??

The reason I became an executive coach and started a company was because I was fired, knocked on my back and HAD to make the change.? Sadly most of us don’t change without a crisis.

So fortunately for Google this is the kick in the ass that they needed to wake up from their torpor but fixing Bard to make sure it works isn’t going to solve the underlying issue.? Google needs to take a long, hard look at the culture they think they have vs. the culture they actually have.??

In my experience building LEAP - Transformación Cultural and coaching leaders, when people aren’t innovating enough, often the culprit is ironically, psychological safety.??

That’s “The belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes.”

Why "ironically"?? Because Google knows this.? They helped popularize the term coined by Harvard professor and writer Amy Edmondson .? In 2012 Google published the results of a study called Project Aristotle where they surveyed a large number of teams over several years to understand which characteristics are most common in “high performance” teams.??

The most important factor?? You guessed it: psychological safety .??

When you have high levels of psychological safety you can have good, old fashion screaming matches.? People challenge each other.? They fight and argue and it’s all good because it’s not personal.? It’s about making the team, products and company better. ? At 亚马逊 they used to call it “disagree and commit.”??

But as we’ve seen in several cases over the past few years, Google has fired people who have spoken out:? Margaret Mitchell , Timnit Gebru and Blake Lemoine .? Naturally, there are always 2 sides to every story and we have to be wary of placing 100% of the blame on Google.

But the point still holds and the iceberg beneath the water still begs the really uncomfortable question:

“Is there enough psychological safety at Google not only to compete with Chat GPT but remain the technology leader it has always been”?

Time will tell.

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