What Would Google Do?: Reverse-Engineering the Fastest Growing Company in the History of the World

Read this a while back and is an engaging read about innovation

Amazing way to be influence your life! Love the way it was written!

Google

Thomas Elliott.

The author does a great job applying the ideas of google to all kinds of situations. Inspiring!

This was an interesting audiobook, and Jeff Jarvis, the author, did a good job as narrator. I enjoyed hearing about things through "Google lenses," since Google has grown by leaps and bounds. One point especially interesing to me was how Google's search page is so simple, but can take you to so many places, while Yahoo's home page is so crowded. Who's the market leader here?

Three chapters into it and so far it's excellent. Great business ideas and the author is well on top of what's going on in business and social media.

While Jarvis' insights were interesting, they weren't interesting enough to get me to finish the book.

I think the problem for me was that the book was targeted more at the business community than at the casual observer.

I'm conflicted. I suspect the book is very good, but it just didn't interest me enough. Ergo, the 4 star rating. 5 stars for probable content and 3 stars for average personal interest average out to 4 stars.

I'm putting this on my 'most highly recommended' list.

Jeff Jarvis' What Would Google Do? is more of an exploration of innovative business and leadership practices than it is an examination of Google. My worry had been that Jarvis' book might spend too much time fawning over Google, but for the most part, he avoids that and even manages to briefly discuss such warts as the whole China issue.

Jarvis discusses how the world is becoming "googlier" in terms of becoming more networked, interactive, diffuse and innovative. The world of the future will be much more open to experimentation and even to acknowledged failure. In the future, we will need to listen to feedback much more closely than we have in the past and will also have to respond more agilely to these problems than we have in the past.

Jarvis also offers suggestions for how other industries can get their googliness on. He looks at banking, health care, education, government, restaurants, and the like.

The world he predicts will, from my perspective of education, be incredibly challenging. Schools tend to be rather traditionalist and authoritarian in their approach. Teachers have tended to act autonomously with little input from colleagues, students, or parents sought or expected. Teachers have been the source of all knowledge and authority. But as people come to expect different interactions with authorities, schools will be challenged.

I don't quite know how we'll respond to these trends. I don't know that most schools are thinking about them except as remote intellectual thought-exercises. But as I read about the decline of the publishing industry, the movie industry, newspapers, music, and the like, I think we're avoiding something we can't really avoid.

What Would Google Do? doesn't provide much in terms of specific answers, but it asks the right questions and provides some guideposts that we ignore at our own risk.