Jemima Kiss
guardian.co.uk

It was Rupert Murdoch who summed up success in the digital age when he said: “Big will not beat small any more – it will be the fast beating the slow.” That might be inspiring for startups, but in the process-laden, corporate environment, how can big companies keep their edge by moving quickly and lightly? This has become something of an obsession for Google watchers, who have seen the college research project develop into a multi-billion-dollar phenomenon, stretching from mobile software and blogging to social networking and the ubiquitous search. How does a company with 20,000 staff manage to keep innovating?

Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, thinks size should help. “It’s important for people to realise that you should benefit from the scale – if you’re not benefiting then you’re doing something wrong, and might as well break up into lots of little things. Instead of having our employees in large buildings, we could have several thousand houses each with a garage — there’s nothing stopping us from doing that. But the fact is that as we scale, we should be able to take advantage of that. Look at how many colleagues can you talk about a specific issue with, and how can you take advantage of a piece of infrastructure that the company already has.”

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