Management Tour to Silicon Valley [USA 04/15/2007]

This blog was posted to the website by the site administrator on behalf of the management tour organizers "BayView Innovations" www.bayviewinnovations.com and "FastForvard" www.fforward.biz companies.

Why is Silicon Valley so popular throughout the world? What is its mystery? Many people have compared this place to the place where every dollar put is the ground gives back an incredible profit! Indeed, there is something special in this place. Most importantly are its business climate, relationships between people, and the people themselves.

For seven days, a group of Ukrainian and Russian general directors and owners of companies (comprising of over 30 people) conducted a manager’s tour where they visited the best companies in Silicon Valley. Among them, there were Intel, Google, LinkedIn, Cisco, Symantec, Sun Microsystems, eBay, and Skype.

Since Silicon Valley is not only the heart of the global IT industry, but also a Mecca for venture investors, these managers also participated in organized meetings with the biggest and the most influential venture funds in the world: the Asset Management Fund and the Draper Fisher Jurvetson. The manager’s tour concluded with personal meetings with the best patent advocates, WEB and mobile technologies specialists, and with a professor of one of the best business school in US—the Haas Business School at the University of Berkeley.

Management tours have become, in a way, a breakthrough for the Russian-Ukrainian business. Silicon Valley, a place that in general was closed to strangers and people from post Soviet countries, opened their doors to the 30 owners and directors of 17 companies (15 Ukrainian and 2 Russian companies—one from Nizhniy Novgorod and the other from Saint-Petersburg).

INTRODUCTION

Every time you come to California, especially to Silicon Valley, you have to ask yourself how exactly did this “miracle” happen that all the hi-tech companies immediately began to build their offices here?

One of the most important elements of the Silicon Valley phenomenon is Stanford University. This place, as was said by one famous American professor, is a place where students are not only smart, but also very rich. In particular, Stanford University graduates have founded such companies as Google (Sergey Brin and Larry Page), Yahoo! (David Filo & Jerry Yang http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo), HP (David Packard and Bill Hewlett http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewlett-Packard), and others. Thus, Stanford University and the Stanford Business School have shown to be a fusion of minds for hi-tech companies. According to the legend, the founder of Stanford University, Leland Stanford, while governor of California, lost his son. Therefore, he left all his fortune to build and develop the university. He said, “Now children of California will be our children.” To this day, Stanford has many children and they are bright, talented, and work in some of the most famous IT companies in the world.

On the first day of our visit to the states, the spirit of Stanford surrounded everything. We visited Stanford University and the Stanford Business School and were given an inside tour of the university. We walked through Stanford Park, where against the background of beautiful nature, you can find the unique atomic accelerator. We even stayed at a hotel that bared Stanford’s name—Stanford Park Hotel. Indeed, it was a wonderful experience to be connected to one of the world’s best universities!

ONE: INTEL—THE LEADER OF IT INDUSTRY

Since a management tour is not an excursion but something bigger, we took our positive emotions we gained while visiting Stanford and spent all-day Monday in one of the most famous companies of the world and the leader of microprocessor manufacturing—Intel.

All the meetings were organized on the very professional level. During our eight hours spent in Intel, we met with four vice-presidents each in charge of a different department in Intel: selling, business, and technology development; mobile devices and communications; innovations and investments in new products; product line development.

John Davies, Vice President of Global Programs (the World Ahead Program) began with a presentation. John has worked at Intel for more than 27 years and was able to succinctly show us where global market is going and how companies need to respond to these changes. Essentially, the main task of Intel, as John taught, is to predict and form the future and the direction of company’s development for the next several years.

How can Intel do that? First, Intel must develop and offer the market each month new solutions that will help to make computers available to everyone in the world. The concrete goal is Internet access for another one billion of people by 2015. This seems like a really ambitious goal, but if they concentrate their attention on developing countries, this goal is possible.

In order to fully achieve this goal, the company must work in four directions: accessibility, connectivity (to the internet), education (of the users), and content. In each of these directions, Intel offers various solutions and developments that helps make computers even more accessible. To prove that, John Davies showed us the realization of this theory in practice—a minicomputer for kids. The miracle of this computer is that it can bare a glass of water poured out onto its keyboard, falling from the table, and many other kid’s “accidents”. You might ask why Intel needs kids as their potential clients. John explained that they make up over half a billion users.

One of the false strategies, from which, John Davies warned the audience, is selling old, out-dated technology in the developing countries. This practice may give a company a quick profit, but it forces the company to invest into old infrastructure that eventually needs to be changed.

In addition to these strategies described by John Davies, Inga Vailionis, a Technical Program Manager at the Microprocessor Technology Lab, gave us some further instruction. Her presentation centered on the future of the microprocessor market. With over 30 years of use, Moore Law has confirms its fairness and the tempo of changing old microprocessors with new ones. The improvements of the quality of microprocessors today is minimizing costs for electronics tomorrow and also improving company’s work effectiveness. What really astonished all of us is Intel’s strategy of development. Intel doesn’t want to further expand into the market and saturate it with new products (due to the lack of time and constant rush). It simply releases new types of processors to local producers. Then the global partners work on the “small things” as adaptation, packaging, marketing, etc. In general, Intel is a big research polygon. They know how to develop the best processors in the world and to do it well. The rest is the work of the market and partners.

As said before, one of the most important (and expansive in implementation) is the goal to provide “access to the Internet”. During our visit to Intel, Vice President Siavash Alamouti told us how the works in that direction. Siavash was the head of the team that worked on the development of wireless access and, thus, the topic was very interesting.

There were several interesting points introduced by Intel representatives dealing with Internet connectivity and access. We learned about the success of Broadband wired services such as cable and DSL, in addition to WiFi, and the new breakthrough technology of Mobile Broadband Internet. Now users have access to the Internet everywhere and anytime. The producers of this technology and devices worked towards achieving this goal. One interesting fact that Intel found during a research project was that as mobile phone screen get bigger, there is a need for a larger Internet channels. This is something that companies have only begun to think about. In the future, the main devices for accessing the Internet will be smaller computers, and bigger pocket devices. These are just several of conclusions among others, connected with wireless devices that we made after hearing this part of Siavash’s presentation.

In Ukraine, there is continued development of WiMax and WiFi technologies. In 2005, a new commercial provider began to work. Kyiv and Kharkiv were the first cities where these technologies were used. By the end of 2007, almost six Ukrainian cities will begin to use this type of wireless technology. This technology is being implemented and tested in the famous children camp “Artek”.

During the second part of the day, the presentations became even more interesting, particularly because the topics were practically unknown to Ukrainian and Russian companies themselves. They discussed, first, investment into perspective technologies for the constant development of the company, and, secondly, organizational structures and personnel development strategies in the hi-tech companies.

One the most interesting directions of Intel’s work is investing into new products and technologies. Intel has a venture fund that selects technologies, develops them, and implements them into their solutions. They call this course of work Intel Capital. This topic was introduces by Intel Vice President Angela Biever.

So what is Intel Capital and how is it interesting for the Ukrainian business? Intel gathered more than one billion of dollars to invest into new technologies. Even more interesting is that 60% of all the capital is invested in companies that are created and work outside US. Intel accomplishes this strategy by buying the company’s stocks after public disposal on IPO. During the discussion with Angela Biever, she convinced participants that Intel is fully open to investing in new projects in Ukraine and Russia. Intel is open to this type of investment and has all the necessary means to make to bring projects to fruition in the global business community.

The final part of our stay at Intel was dedicated to the development of personnel. Intel works around the clock to enable workers to develop themselves both vertically and horizontally. The mere fact that most of the speakers that spoke to the group have worked for the company for more than 8 years is a proof of that. During the presentation of Tom Galvin, the Vice President of Human Resources, he explained how Intel solves the problem of functional affiliation to one or other business group in the company, what opportunities, and requirements are available to workers and how this global company manages to run 144 offices in 60 countries. It was a really remarkable presentation.

The last topic was the production and the line development of processors. Not to get too much into the technical aspects, there still is a need to state that in the research activities the company is at least one year ahead of the competition. They are already working on 45 nm processors called Xeon. This process of innovation and development is put on the line whenever a new processor is announced. The development of this processor is being launched right now and the processor will be in production in two years. In general, the process of minimizing the nanomicnones in the processor (one the square unit it is possible to integrate more silicon crystals) leads to reducing the costs of the processor and the computer, and also reducing the use of electricity. By 2009, Intel is planning to launch a processor with 23 nm—this is three times less than in 2003. To prove the fact that Intel indeed leads in the development of processors, on February 14, the company announced an alliance of the mutual advancement of processors and platforms. The advertisement of that alliance was quite funny: “Valentine’s Day is almost here, but we had to pre-announce a match made in heaven.” Cute. That is what “marrying for money” of two super successful IT companies looks like.

DAY TWO: СISCO AND LINKEDIN—TWO EMBODIMENTS OF THE LAW OF COMMUNICATIONS!

Maybe it was fate or just good planning, but the second day of the management tour was fully dedicated to leading companies in the communication field. The first company, Cisco, is a giant of network communications that develops network devices, protocols, and networking technology. The second company, LinkedIn, is the leader in social and business communications that created the most famous Internet social network in the world. These two meetings helped us to learn “communications” from different angles.

First we learned about Cisco is now and its place in the field of network communications. The name of the company is the shortening of San FranCISCO. In fact, many of the Silicon Valley companies’ names are after their geographic location (e.g. eBay, Juniper, etc.). The logo of Cisco is a stylization of the Golden Gate bridge—the bridge that crosses the San Francisco Bay. The company’s campus includes 35 buildings on more than dozen hectares. So, during our meetings with top management and other presentations, we were moved from one building to another.

Peter Jankowski, Vice President of Cisco, told us about their new, interesting strategy. If the company sees in their product line a lack of some technological link, it solves the problem by simply buying the leading company that specializes in link. For the last five years, Cisco has bought more than one hundred different companies; thus, expanding its influence in the IT world. As a side note, when Cisco purchases another company, they transfer all of the employees to Cisco, unlike standard Ukrainian practice. They believe that the technologies itself without the people is simply a set of iron things and algorithms, but with people it is a good business. When one of the participants of the management tour asked Peter about his feelings when Cisco bought his company, Peter responded, “Yes, really, it was sad. I really worried and am still suffering. But, hey, they proposed a very good price!” Participants laughed. This is how their business strategy works.

During our visit to Cisco, it was evident the company wants to cover all the demands in the communications field. If you need distance monitoring of some location in the world, you can find a fully equipped center here that is build with latest techniques. Information comes here from all parts of the world in. If you want to equip your office with a “smart” notification system in case of some catastrophe that will send all your employees an immediate notification, you can find the special Cisco equipment for that. In fact, Cisco products are used in many centers of operant response that look after the extreme situations. During our visit, we had the opportunity to check out one of these centers.

In order to realize their goal of being #1 in communication solutions, Cisco focuses in several different areas: transferring of data, transferring of video signals, and smart program maintenance for data administration, and authenticating systems. Cisco is like an all-seeing eye keeping watch over everything.

One more innovative solution that was presented is the Telepresence system. If you need to have an online meeting with people located in different parts of the world, then you need this product. It is extremely realistic and is hard to tell that your colleagues are really that far away from you. This is not just a system of video cameras, but also a completely technical solution that combines video, audio, and multimedia opportunities in order to fully diminish the distance factor.

The second part of the day followed the slogan that “communication is everything and all the power of communication is in people”. We visited the most successful and famous company in the sphere of social network communications LinkedIn. Their main theme was how you can earn millions of dollars simply by your networking connections. LinkedIn is young, perspective company that has earned its money on the idea of the business network, where every person can build relations, with the help of recommendations from people that everybody knows. Sociology asserts that there are you can link any person and someone else, like Bill Gates for example, in less than six people. With the help of proper communication, you can be introduced to that person. This company builds a vast business network of approximately ten million professionals that unites 130 different business spheres.

This company is very open and its entire business model is built on trust. Even in the company office, everything radiated openness with a bit of a childish style. Throughout the office were different toys. Walking around the office, managers just sat and talked with you. This soft and friendly atmosphere does not prevent the company from earning a good profit and having a workable business model. For instance, every week more than 160 thousand people register on the site. Practically every second, someone registers in the system. Their profits come from three things: selling services to people who need contacts to bring profit (i.e. recruiters, business developers), selling additional tools for finding jobs, and selling non-intrusive advertisement with high target level. As one person said, in Silicon Valley as in the business world relations do matter and this model indeed works. This company has been successful in expanding its services in Ukraine and Russia. Actually, during the presentation, an executive over product development said one of the main places where social networks are really popular is Kiev (which is not that unexpected) and Kharkiv (many programmers that work for outsourcing).

What really distinguishes LinkedIn from other companies we visited is the atmosphere and their working style. If Intel and Cisco were likened to a company of bureaucratic rulers and procedures, then LinkedIn would be considered more like an “interest club”. Additionally, the group heard more about their unique style of building personnel relations and asked many questions pertaining to this issue.

The last part of the second day of our management tour was held in the one of the most respectable venture fund companies in Silicon Valley—Asset Management Fund. They work on outsourcing and developing best business practices. During our meeting with the executive director of the fund, Evgeny Zaytsev, we learned about how venture funds work and how such businesses as LinkedIn, Google, Yahoo!, PayPal, which was created by a Ukrainian, were started. We learned, for example, that venture funds (like Sequoia) in different stages of development invested in such companies as Сisco, Apple and Oracle. It is obvious how their investments paid off. More than 25% of NASDAQ companies were raised by venture funds.

The Asset Management Fund is one of the most famous among those in Silicon Valley as it invests in biotech companies. The fund works under common principles that all funds have. However, their unique structure with pension funds, private people, etc. gives them an edge on the competition. They invest money into venture funds with the goal to get over a specific period of time (the period varies, but generally its up to 8 years) a high return. You can see how high these percentages can be by simply looking at the main figures of any fund. This is called the IRR or internal rate return. The better the fund, the higher the rate. The Asset Management Fund has a 37% IRR, which is quite high comparatively.
Parties that collect money into the fund (fund-raising) are called General Partners (GP), while parties that invest into the fund are called Limited Partners (LP). General Partners get 2% of the collected money, independent of whether the investment was successful or not. When the fund gets money, it decides into what venture (risk) projects to invest.

Each fund has its own strategy. Some invest into projects at the beginning stages of development. This is called seed investment. Others wait to invest until the “A” round. Some companies invest in those that are preparing to go on the IPO. There is no single rule about what part of the project the fund takes while investing.
Venture funds are not simply money investments, but investments of contacts and time. For example, Evgeny told us that among the directors of the funds, the normal practice is to spend several hours on the phone with the director of the company where investments have been made and to share contacts with them.
Entrepreneurs of Ukraine! There are flights to San Francisco are every day, so bravery pack your suitcases and go forward to the Silicon Valley! Who knows, maybe in the future your company can compete on the level with Google, Yahoo!, and LinkedIn. In general, venture funds and business angels in the Silicon Valley have gained special attention. Their introduction has caused a boom in IT market.
Participants of the management tour made several conclusions. First, if you have a decent idea, then you will defiantly find money for it. However, an idea is not enough. You need to patent it (which will cost you like $5,000-$20,000). Next, it is important to note that only .6% of venture projects are successful. However, in that .6% companies like YouTube, Google, Microsoft, etc. were founded. Therefore, if you make it, there is a strong likelihood that you make it big! Larry Page took his idea of Google to over 140 different venture funds and none of them gave him money. With the success of Google, many firms are looking in new directions and are ready to finance more risky projects.
Interesting side note: Many funds have not only a portfolio of its clients on their Web sites but also an anti-portfolio that consists of missed opportunities (like Google).

DAY THREE: SUN MICROSYSTEMS AND SYMANTEC—FREEDOM AND SECURITY.

The third day of our stay in the Silicon Valley gave us some new ideas to ponder. We had already visited several totally different companies in terms of their essence, management style, technologies, and services. The only thing that seemed to unite them all was their leadership in their particular sector of IT industry. We now had the opportunity to meet with Sun—a unique company that created the “distant work” system and the servers to support it. Sun also created the heavily used JAVA language. We also had the chance to visit Symantec—the leader of computer security and anti-virus solutions.

Sun is a unique company that has proven that its business model really works. Sun found that most see computers as monitors, system unit, keyboard etc. Because of this physical limitation employees’ tasks are not always spread effectively between different people, there are often people who have nothing to do and others that have way too much to do. Sun’s solution was drastically different from the current ideas of the time. To Sun, a computer is monitor, keyboard and small information reader to put a card no bigger than a credit card. When an employee inserts their card, a request to the server is made and after several of seconds, they receive their work. It’s a hard concept to grasp, but it is called “OpenWork”, literally, open, available work. Sun’s computers (Sun Ray 2) are really good solution because it gives its employees “access to any working computer from any place”. This gives employees the opportunity not to be in the office. We were amazed, when the demonstrator took out the card from one computer, stopping the work on it, and put than the card in the other. On the second monitor, the exact same application in the same condition appeared, just like on the first computer.

After demonstrating such “tricks”, a big part of the meeting was held by the CIO of Sun, Robert Worrall, and Vice President, John Dutra. The majority of the questions from the participants were related to the management of the personnel under such a system. People wanted to know who can work from home and who do you need to watch carefully.

As a side note, it should be mentioned that the whole Silicon Valley (and all IT world in general) is divided into two camps as to how to manage personnel. The first camp includes companies such as IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, and Intel. These companies work in offices with specific time restrains and moderated personnel freedom. The second camp includes companies like Google, LinkedIn, and Sun that have a more democratic management style that gives employees quite a bit of freedom and flexibility. Ukrainian managers can decide what to camp they would like to use for their companies. Either way, it’s good to know all the alternatives.

At Sun, participants were able to see unique devices like spy planes, stabilization systems, and prototypes of flying devices that were all coded on Java language. They even demonstrated a depository of information encoded on several terabytes that can work on critically low temperatures. They explained that even PlayStation 3 is coded with Java. The practical effect seen in the company is that innovation is important. Sun is methodical with goal-oriented methods and is not changing its strategy.

The second company we visited this day was Symantec. Symantec has a very unique product called Norton that has been the leader of computer security for decades. More recent products include those that are made up of special networks that track independently a changing in the security level and automatically react to it. One of the more recent approaches in anti-virus companies is determining the threat to the program code. We were told that there are such viruses that change its structure after each infection, thus, it’s practically impossible to write a program to eliminate it. That is why Symantec offers a unique solution. It puts each suspicious program in some kind of a mini-computer that they call a “sand box” before each setup. If the program acts positively, then it is allowed to be installed on the computer. If not, it stays in the “sand box”.

Symantec receive a bunch of new, innovative solutions after it bought another big security company called Veritas in 2005. Actually, the amount of companies that Symantec bought in a single year really impressed me. They seemed to incorporate the same strategy as Intel. The director of the department that works on searching for new solutions and potential companies to buy said: “We don’t want to reinvent the bicycle. Everything that is needed to for future growth we buy”. Maybe Ukrainian companies in future will be able to buy world famous companies in order to strengthen its position on the global market.

Our interesting day ended with a master class from Andrew Isaacs, a professor of the Haas School of Business. During his career, Andrew consulted many hi-tech companies and naturally was an extremely interesting teacher. Many people were interested to hear that the first the main venture fund was managed by the government and it was only afterwards that private funds appeared. It would be great to see our Verhovna Rada to work like that. Additionally, during his presentation we discussed the direction of investments. An interesting fact Andrew added was that even statistics confirm that investments cannot be useful in all of the sectors. It even can be a negative factor in some sectors. This day gave us so much to think about.

DAY FOUR: PRACTICE AND CONNECTIONS—THE SECURITY OF THE SUCCESS!

Day four was the first day that gave participants the chance to relax a bit. The day was less intensive but still very saturated. We were divided into interest groups and then sent to organized meetings with people that play a major role in that area in Silicon Valley. Patent confidants, consultants on technologies and marketing in companies on IT market – these are the people that are really respected in the Silicon Valley and without whom many deals wouldn’t come into reality. Also interesting was the AMBAR event that was dedicated to the Russian-speaking professionals in IT sphere at the Silicon Valley.

The group that was interested in the development of mobile technologies, they had their first meeting with the father or creator of the wireless mobile technologies in US—Peter Alexander. Among his achievements are the creation of WiFi industry in US and WiMax development of mutual projects with big companies.

Everyone was interested in the direction and development of the mobile market. All the industry already knows that nothing brand-new is going to come and replace the common standards of mobile connection. Thus, the most perspective direction is the Internet. That is where we need to expect more innovative services. The main questions are posed by companies that work in the field of mobile communication is how to make this transition less painful and smoother. We learned that WiFi and WiMax technologies can only develop with the “laptop users”, since this group of users practically doesn’t use voice and transmitting data services. These two rectangular components are the main profit zones for companies. Experts think that market is moving into the direction of WiMax, 3G, 4G, Web 2.0, 3.0.

One more question that was touched on during that day was the “protection of the rights on the intellectual developments” of the companies. In Silicon Valley, this is one of the most important parts of the business process. However bright your idea is, you will fail if you do not patent it. Now, there are extremes in that. For example, some companies make patents on things like “the mechanism of clicking with one finger and going to the next site with the help of the link”. There are really big and funny extremes in what to patent. In general, the advice given is that there is only a need to patent your general idea. The more “expanded and global” your patent is, the harder it will be for your competitors and easier to you to prove your point in the court. As a rule, the work of the patent confidants is based on checking the existence of such patent. He will also evaluate your juridical chances. Of course, plan to spend hundreds of dollars per hour of work for the work of the patent specialist.

The day ended with the AMBAR event dedicated to the Russian-speaking professionals in IT sphere of Silicon Valley. It included meeting with consultants in the IT marketing sphere, and Web 2.0

DAY FIVE: IF THERE IS HEAVEN FOR WORKERS, IT’S GOOGLE.

In the fifth day of the management tour, everyone waited to see the last company, Google. Google is rated the #1 work place in the world. There are thousand of articles written about how good it is to work for Google. We had the opportunity to see for ourselves.

As stated above, Google is one of those companies that have a very democratic style of governing. Google has a “family type” of work environment in the company. The only conceptual difference from the Sun or LinkedIn is that Google wants to make work practically a home for the employees. Google has everything! They incorporate the principle of 40 feet. The basics of this principle is that within 40 feet of any employee there should be some type of snacks (like fruits, berries, etc) in order for employees to have a snack and continue working. Additionally, if you want to do some sports, you can find a trainer for that at work. If you are feeling sick, there are six doctors ready for you at work. It is a perfect society.

Our acquaintance with Google started by signing the special documents about non-disclosure, promising not to film inside the company. On the entrance to the complex (the whole Googleplex consists of four buildings), there is a big server—this is not a coincidence. When company was young and all the money went towards its development, Sergey Brin and Larry Page have decided to buy a bunch of cheap servers rather than a few expensive ones. The company grew very fast and the broken servers were immediately replaced. The quantity of servers for Web grew and now the whole “server” company looks like the big stadium. Google is the leader in collecting servers in the world, just to complete their own needs.

As participants of the management tour, we found that the essence of the Google culture lies in two things: Super tough selection of personnel and openness inside the company. As Lidia Shtarkman, the senior manager of the company, explained, even after working at Wall Street in the sphere of merger and acquisitions, it was tough to get a job here. She passed several interviews and only after them, she was given an offer. Interesting fact: during the interview, the potential employee meets not only with the HR department, but also with his or her future colleagues, functional directors, and project directors. As part of your interview, any person from Google can come and express their opinion about the person who wants to get the job. Until recently, the co-founder of the company Sergey Brin actually personally selected people and made decisions concerning their employment. That would be really strange for Ukrainian top-management. In such precise selection lies at least 50% of the success of Google. As Lidia told us, only 8-10 people have left the company, which is amazing for a company with over 10,000 employees.

It’s one thing is to attract an employee, it’s another to keep and motivate them. One of the main motivations at Google is the level of freedom and absence of bureaucracy. As we were dining in the famous Google café, Larry Page came in. We watched as he calmly walked in and sat down just like everyone else. In the restaurant, we met the first Google employee. He was full of kindness and really modest. You could tell that he had a sense of equality. That of course that motivates a lot of people!

One more pleasant feature for employees is the “20%” rule. This rule has employees spend 80% of his working time on his main projects, and other functional requirements he was hired for, and for the other 20% he can spend it on any other project or social activities of the company. The only restriction is that the 20% should benefit the company somehow. Many innovative products Google has developed (for example Google Earth, gmail, etc.) were made by people during their 20% time. It must really help people to not be caught up on one project or one work and not to lose interest in innovative solutions and the desire to work. Everywhere on the walls are papers that say, “Remember that you have 20% time rule”. Undoubtedly this creative solution works.

Another thing that motivates employees is the Google office itself. Not to go into too much detail (there have been many books written about it), but it is safe to say that there is everything that you would ever want in Google complex. The style in general is really hospitable, everything is colorful and pleasant. In one of the courtyards near one of the eight restaurants, there is a volleyball court and near that a skeleton of the dinosaur. Don’t ask why they put it thereJ. In one of the four buildings, you can find a copy of the cosmic shuttle Virgin of the legendary device N328KF that Larry Page and Segey Brin bought from Richard Branson. In general, as was said by the Google engineer Igor Krivokon, the style of the office is like a PhD program. There is the same level of intellectual obligations, the same level of intensity and smart people around. That’s why employees that come directly from universities feeling quite good about the environment. Additionally, Google periodically invites interesting people from various spheres to come and make a presentation. Politicians, artists, musicians, and simply famous people frequently attend. Inside the company, the announcement of the upcoming meetings is spread around and sometimes hundreds of people come to hear them. The Google office has been visited by such famous people as Gorabechev, Hillary Clinton, and others. Why company does that? In order to show the success of these people, thus motivate its employees, and expand their horizons. Even the day we came to visit Google, there was some presentation done, by some famous speaker.

Just a couple of words about the development of Google in Ukraine and Russia. There are two offices in Russia and representation of Google in Ukraine. The company is very positive in developing its offices here, since the biggest part of scientific and IT potential is situated in these two countries. Recently Google has had several meetings with the best technological universities in Russia—MIFI, Baumen, etc

Google is pursuing two goals: some kind of educational campaign about the company and their products and the other goal is to expand the working force of Google. Such competent personnel selection has brought much success to Google and is a good example for other companies.

You can talk a lot about Google, and still the picture won’t be full. When we were at this special and unique place, we really wanted to ask the managers, when do you work?” J
Seriously, Google has created an attractive image based on openness and sincere relations between people—very smart people.

THE FINAL DAY: RESTART.

The last day of our stay in Silicon Valley gave us an opportunity to visit San Francisco. Participants visited the famous prison Alcatraz, where prisoners lived like the genius Al Capone. We walked on the Golden Gate Bridge. This last day of the program was simply a time to rest and relax before the long flight home, where work anxiously already awaited our return. We now need to realize all that we saw and learned here. Maybe, after this management tour, something changed in each of us that were connected to the great management principles of the companies that we visited.

FastForward. ©
Dmitriy Bondar