Newsweek reports Google's Ten Golden Rules. A marvellous advert for Google? But I am not swayed by the advertising. Let's pretend for a second that Google is not a public company and therefore not suffering a potential financial conflict of interest in following these rules.
1) Hire by committee. Well, most tech companies do this these days. Arguably more so for small companies than large, because a bad hiring decision hurts a lot more if you are small. Anyway, nothing new here.
2) Cater to their every need. So that they won't need to go home?
3) Pack them in. People share offices just so that they can talk to each other? What about the need for quiet time to work a problem alone? That's more important that being F2F with someone all the time. I find that IM works quite well for the 3-4 people I'm typically working with at any one time.
4) Make coordination easy. Every company tries to do this – a bit of a content-free point.
5) Eat your own dog food. The most important thing on this list and one that every company should do. The world is full of bad software that suffered because companies didn't do this (Microsoft Visual Sourcesafe, I'm looking at you).
6) Encourage creativity. Ah yes, the famous Google 20% time project. I've got to hand it to the person at Google who came up with this – it's an inspired way to get engineers to work the rest of the hours in the week too.
7) Strive to reach consensus. “The many are smarter than the few?” I think Apple would disagree. Google's business is built around the many, but I think it's a bit shortsighted to extend this to people.
8) Don't be evil. This means nothing. Particularly when you have shareholders to answer to.
9) Data drive decisions. Any MBA student knows this is “Decision Making in Business 101”.
10) Communicate effectively. While this might be profound to the likes of GM, there's nothing different here from any tech company worth its salt.