Doing Business in the United States : Case Google by David PIOCHE

Doing business in the US is very different from France even if our culture have some similarities. That’s why we learn at school how to do business in the US. Today, we are

From left to right, Elliot DUNCKER (BBA INSEEC student), 
Matt JONES (Principal Account Manager at Google) 
and David PIOCHE (BBA INSEEC student)

going to talk about Google. Google is a company that have been created in San Francisco in September 1998 by Larry PAGE and Sergey BRIN. Thanks to our teacher, we met Matt JONES who is principal account manager at the google office in Chicago. In the first paragraph, we are going to speak about google and how they grow their business. Then, in the second part, we are going to talk about google mentoring and innovation.

New Office in Chicago

First of all, the first office of google was in a garage in a house in San Francisco. Since 17 years, they grow their business worldwide. Nowadays, they have offices around the world. In Europe, the biggest office is based in Dublin, however you have small offices in Paris, London, Madrid, etc. Then you have also offices in Africa, Asia, South America and North America with the headquarters based in Mountain View in California (United States). They don’t have any offices in countries like Saudi Arabia because of the rules of shareholders. Alphabet Inc. is the parent company of google since 2015. Google represent 96% of the employees working for the parent company. Today, Google have 54000 employees, whereas the parent company has around 60000 employees including Google employee. Thanks to the restructure, the number of shareholders have increase and the action in Wall Street have been increased in the meantime. Matt have been at google for 6 years now, and he can sees how Google is well established on the market. In fact, when he came to Google, Chicago office contain only 200 employees. And right now, 700 employees are working in Chicago Google office. During the past 3 years and a half, they have built a new building (see picture above) were they are working now. Matt loves this new building because it is really representing Google. They could built this new building because Google is a multimillions dollars company. The first revenue of Google is advertising which is representing 90% of their revenue. Then, they are also making money on few application, even if it stills a smallest revenue.

Google is innovative, and this is probably one of the reasons of their success. Matt preferred application are Nest and Google Now. Nest is an application which control the energy in your house. With the geo-localization, they will know where you are in your house or if you

are at work. In fact they cross several factor that are going to say if you are at home or at work. For instance, if you are at 7am in traffic, you are probably going to work, which means that you don’t need your heating or cooling system at home. Then, the second application, Google Now is preventing you when you have something unexpected in your day concerning traffic for example. Indeed, in the case that you leave at 7am your home to go to the work, the application can say hurry up you have an accident on the Highway and you need to leave 30min earlier. Nevertheless, this creativity is linked to Google way of managing. In fact, 20% of your time per week is about doing something else than work, or you can move to another country or city and work for another office. Thanks to this time off, employees have time to think about new product. Moreover, for google, family is first because if you have family problem, you won’t be productive at work, and you can still work online when you are at home. Afterwards, mentoring is essential for Google. They have session of leadership coaching because they want to give the opportunity to employees to rise to the top. Then, leaders are available and you are not going to be inappropriate if you invite one of them to lunch with you. For Google, mentoring is the opportunity to gain experience with people. In addition to all of that, google offer free lunch sometimes or the possibility to be part of a sports team. Consequently people in the company are going to talk with other people and it makes you more sociable.

To conclude, Google is a huge company today, thanks to their creativity they are clearly an international leader in their sector. They are very well trained in case of a catastrophe. Indeed, they trained 3 times a years in case of a crisis if the data center is down. The data

center is next to the ocean in the goal of cooling the facilities thanks to the water and it helps to use less electricity. Nowadays, Google is improving their application like Google Map and they try to find new product for their customers. Moreover, they are expanding their market by implanting new offices. The next office will be in India because the market doesn’t have access to internet. And sometimes they implant new offices because the market is not saturated.

Google Mission:

“Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”