IS ALPHABET(GOOGLE) EARTH'S SMARTEST COMPANY?

“Doing the right thing is more important than doing the thing right’’

---Peter Drucker, 1909—2005

‘’A company is a group organized to create a product or service, and it is only as good as its people and how excited they are about creating”

---Elon Musk

A week or so before the close of the 2015/16 academic session two of my female pre- degree business studies students had ( in an informal out-of-classroom gathering involving some other students) said to me, ‘’thanks Mr Ngeri for being our teacher, and especially for making us know that Google is a company’’. The other one continued, ‘’do you know I didn’t always know that, I thought it was just something we use when we want to go on the internet’’. I thanked them in return, and said if that was the one thing they took from the duration of our class it sure was better than having straight As in their then pending final examination.

Today this view of mine has not changed any less. On the contrary I think I am stronger than just that. I am of the mental frame that not lower than 75% of management science professors in Africa should not be engaged if a new generation business school is to be sited in the continent. The curriculum will be drawn mostly on the very profoundness of thoughts and competitive practices of earth’s greatest companies, and the instructors from only those who so understand and are willing to ‘’profess’’ what the late C. K Prahalad referred to as the ‘’next practices’’.

Ordinarily Google rightly earns a place as one of earth’s greatest companies, but was Google started just like any other company? Is Alphabet (now Google’s parent company) yet another company by the founders of Google? Every corporate attorney can correctly define the legalese of a company just as the average American business school MBA can run his/her mouth as to what constitute ‘’best practices’’, and ‘’ competitive strategies’’, irrespective of whether any of these can correctly account for what led not only to the 1998-founding of Google but also to its parent company Alphabet( in 2015), and what Alphabet means to the world.

Alphabet, incorporated in 2015 as the parent company to Google and its other subsidiaries, is currently valuated to be in the neighbourhood of $600bn second only to Apple Inc (the world’s most valuable company). Google, the search engine arm and Alphabet’s foremost subsidiary is not only the global leader in online searches but correctly the one search business on earth. Peter Thiel would have us believe that great businesses happen only once, and so it is right to say (like Thiel did) that the business of search, on earth, has happened with Google. According to stats made available by NETMARKETSHARE online, for the month of March, 2017 Google’s Desktop Search Engine Market share stood at 77.43% while that of Baidu (China’s internet company), Bing, Yahoo—Global, and Ask—Global were 8.13%, 7.31%, 5,6%, and 0.16% respectively.

It is known that even with this lead Google has to continue improving on search. As the very brilliant Marissa Mayer (Yahoo’s current CEO, and Google’s first female engineer) once pointed out, the problem of search is yet to be solved. Again, we live in a world where disruption thinking defines the very soul of entrepreneurship, so the possibility of some newcomer ‘’disrupting’’ Google’s efforts so far may be contemplated but even at that Alphabet seemed positioned or working toward this positioning, and may likely become that newcomer’s parent. The Google we know today (now Alphabet) has at one time or another, from its incorporation date been peopled by some of the very best brains in the world of technology, and it doesn’t seem likely that this founding tenet will ever give way.

Today, the very act of attracting what is popularly described as A+ talents to boost any entrepreneurial engagement has almost become another management sureway-to-success formula. Google, however, appears to have been better diligent at doing this. Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin (two wonderfully brilliant computer science doctoral learners at Stanford University) principally to organise globally existing information in a way and manner to afford seekers better accessibility. The computer algorithms written by this duo emerged competitively superior to extant search efforts at the time. And to grow their efforts they knew the calibre of efforts they needed so they went for Eric Schmidt who wasn’t only another intellectual smart but also was industry savvy; in fact famed for rewriting a company’s software as an intern. Eric Schmidt became Google’s CEO from 2001 to 2011 working with Page and Brin --- a period Brin was to later describe as ‘’adult supervision’’.

With Eric Schmidt at the core leadership/management end while the duo of Page and Brin looked after search and other products Google grew steadily as a collection of smarts on its way to becoming a haven for tech-smarts. It won’t be wrong to say that Google has deposited its Googliest thing in a large chunk of those who (globally) work in technology. Marissa Mayer described her acceptance of offer by Google (with respect to several other job offers) as follows, ‘’my quest to find, and be surrounded by smart people is what brought me to Google’’. About a year or so ago Sebastian Thrun, GoogleX developer, former Stanford University professor, father of AI, and the father of Google’s driverless car joked, in a Bloomberg Television program STUDIO 1.0 anchored by Emily Chang, that Google would not hire him if he was to seek employment with the world’s search numero uno, due to the quality of resumes at its disposal.

Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai , in alluding to Larry Page’s ‘smarts’ attributed his securing a job with the company in 2004 to the fact of not being interviewed by Page. Eleven years after, and specifically on the appointment of Sundar to take over from him as CEO, Page said, ‘’Sergey and I have been super excited about his progress and dedication to the company….. I feel very fortunate to have someone as talented as him to run the slightly slimmed down Google…’’’Eric Schmidt, now Alphabet’s executive chairman who was Google’s CEO when Sundar was hired, and who initially disagreed with Sundar’s creative insight to develop the Chrome browser commented on the latter’s ascendancy to the exalted C-suite thus, ‘’Really excited about the vision and brilliance of Sundar….he’s going to be a great CEO’’.

Alphabet, like its first-born child Google may not have been birthed to contest the top positions on both the highly rated annual MIT Technology Review’s Smartest Companies, and Forbes’ Most Innovative Companies, but Alphabet, like Google, is well on course to assembling some of the very smartest who will respond adequately to some of the critical technological challenges which may stand in the way of global human progress. With Page, Brin, and Schmidt Google was able to deliver on Sergey’s avowed desire of wanting ‘’Google to be the third half of our brains’’. And with Page, Brin, and Schmidt still intact Alphabet will do far better than that in the future. This makes Alphabet the smartest company on earth.