Inside the culture clashes of F1 & Google

ALSO: Charles Duhigg on the number 1 way to build psychological safety

I love it when discussions of organisations’ cultures reach the news - and there have been a few juicy examples in the last week. The Red Bull Formula 1 team last week cleared their team principal after an internal investigation into inappropriate texting between him and an employee, the acquittal was immediately followed by hundreds of the cringe-inducing messages being leaked online. It gave the sense of an organisation that wanted to protect one of its patriarchs irrespective of his actions. This week a report into the enduring sexism in the City appeared to cover similar themes: women being ridiculed and abused in a male-dominated environment, attempts to present workplace discussions as flirtatious interest. (‘Is that your boyfriend?’) “Why does it take a white, middle-aged man to deliver what I’ve been saying for it to be taken seriously?” asked one contributor.

As of Thursday the Red Bull whistleblower herself appears to have been suspended.

This isn’t without consequence, research suggests that organisations that tolerate bad behaviour by bosses can see a breakdown of cultural norms and values across the organisation. One study found firms led by CEOs who picked up a criminal record (often for drink driving) were more likely to commit corporate wrongdoing.

But the main catnip for my curiosity was the ongoing drama at Google/Alphabet. For almost a decade Google’s position in the field of artificial intelligence was understood to be a commanding lead. While little of substance had been launched by their Deep Mind business it would occasionally fire off some fireworks in the form of a new model capable of achieving dazzling results on board games like chess, Go and Uno. (Ok, maybe not Uno).

But despite its commercial success, the innovative trajectory of the business it hasn’t lived up to the expectations of it. Wasn’t this the part that the culture was meant to be creating?

A lead on self-driving cars evaporated and even market-leading products like Waze seemed to be complacent. YouTube’s launch of an editing tool was the first consumer video tool in 16 years of existence - a panicked response to TikTok becoming the biggest app in the world. YouTube had also previously ceded live video to Twitch with barely a fight.

When senior executives left (like the founder of Waze) they often observed that the culture at Google is a long way from the effervescent fizz that it projected to the outside world. They articulated instead a slow moving bureaucracy where the aim of the game is just to keep your manager happy. (“Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are ‘inept’ and ‘boring’”) Yes, Google culture was characterised by openness and a willingness to hear difficult questions from employees, but to what end? That was certainly the inference when CEO Sundar Pichai scrapped the company’s weekly Q&A forum, TGIF.

Google was always keen to peddle an idea that its culture was special, even though most people who said it hadn’t really worked anywhere else. The narrative remained long after any evidence for it had gone. When I joined Google 15 years ago a lot of friends asked me what I was going to dedicate my “20% time to”. It only took me a week to realise that barely anyone in the firm actually did 20% projects. (A charitable way of me saying no one at all did). It felt like a family embarrassment, a question to be deflected. “20% time? We call it Saturday," one engineer told me. I adored my time at Google, but the idea that the culture was better (or more inventive) than anywhere else I’d worked was completely untrue.

After being repeatedly embarrassed over the tardiness of its AI offer over the last year the firm suffered more indignity this week. Not only had Google been caught napping yet again but their latest offering of Gemini seemed to be guilty of management by committee.

Yes, superficially it looks like Google’s AI product Gemini was trying too hard to produce images that are excessively inclusive on gender and race dimensions, but in truth the bigger issue is that the whole affair shows a company that has lost sight of creating the thrilling, market leading products that its competitors seem to be summoning on a weekly basis. The famous Google culture has to be reevaluated. It wasn’t their secret sauce at all. A sense of slow-moving comfort and matrix management has removed the organisation from any sense that they have customers or competitors outside. Keep your manager happy, indeed.

Recently Google leadership has exhibited frustrated recognition with what its culture has become but has struggled finding the right levers to use to instigate change.

A series of job cuts have attempted to invoke urgency but reports have suggested that the constant drip of layoffs has killed employee morale. It’s hard for workers to feel like they’re empowered to do brave, inventive work when the threat of firing looms over them. The worst thing you can ever do with redundancies is do more than one round of them. (My Eat Sleep Work Repeat podcast was started when the firm I worked at, Twitter, did two rounds in a year, the culture collapsed so badly I wondered if we could ever revive it and started a podcast to help my quest).

Google/Alphabet is looking more and more like a 1980s style conglomerate, a cluster of unrelated businesses grouped together for the benefit of avoiding ups and downs for shareholders. Conglomerates weren’t famous for innovating.

Except the shareholders aren’t the winners with Google. The firm would be worth considerably more if it was broken for parts - liberating YouTube, spinning off Deep Mind and allowing their teams to compete more aggressively would be better for everyone.

More reading:

• Weird scenes inside the Google goldmine

• How Google lost its way

• Is your boss ignoring your emails? We all prioritise reading shorter messages first. Concise emails get almost double the response rate of wordy ones

• Bosses impact our lives more than our doctors or our therapists - and have as much impact on us as our partners - 71% of people say that work stress impacts their home lives. (Some very useful stats in this piece)

• Have you been laid off? Bloomberg want to hear about your experience - here’s their survey

• Rockstar Games has demanded a 5 day return to the office as they gear up for the release of GTA VI citing confidentiality and productivity reasons. Bloomberg reports that Spider-Man 2 (the biggest selling game of 2023 was made by fully remote teams)

• There’s so much to love about Timpsons: “In our business we have two rules, you put the money in the till and you look the part. The rest… they can do whatever they think is right”. This video gives a clue to the impressively autonomous culture

• 58% of Brits don’t feel productive in the office, along the way blaming talkative colleagues. Massively incorrect take. We need to eliminate some of the bureaucracy of work to free time for more talking. Talking is where the good stuff lives

• When I do work with international companies one thing that stands out is how different the switch to remote work has been. In the UK and Europe it generally means that you live near the office and you travel in two or three days a week. In the US people have often moved their lives to different states. This research shows that point Americans live twice as far from work as they did pre-Covid

• The threat of AI stealing jobs certainly looks more real this week after the announcement by payment firm Klarna that their AI assistant was now doing the work of 700 human agents (this was coincidentally the number of workers they laid off in 2022)

• A third of Brits think their partner is the most annoying person they know

• One from the archives that got some traction again this week: ‘Did extroverts ruin work for the rest of us?’

• The brilliant Sean Adams from Drowned in Sound put me on to this drone music by Hammock. (Good to work to, wouldn’t bang as hard with a rum and coke). Sean’s doing some important work at the moment - a series of podcasts reflecting on the role of music journalism in 2024

What’s the single biggest way to build psychological safety?

Charles Duhigg’s bestseller The Power of Habit was the definitive guide to building and sustaining successful habits. His new book, Supercommunicators, grapples with the knotty topic of creating successful interactions with others.

It’s a thorough and dazzling read that has many applications for the way we work (and how we live our lives).

We talked about:

• the single biggest thing that builds psychological safety

• why moving conversation out of small talk into deep discussion proves more satisfying than we expect

• how teams should use 'who are we' conversations

• how we should think about three different types of conversation (are they looking to be helped, hugged or heard?

Listen: website / Spotify / Apple