Projects that align with an organization’s stated mission are more likely to succeed than those that do not. This article explores how that plays out at Google.The goal is to go through this process in a structured way and for insight on what projects are most likely to succeed or fail.
The Google Mission Statement says the following:
“Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
That certainly is clear…and broad. The question is, what kinds of core projects might be most successful, and which might not be. This analysis is completely extemporaneous and is for the purpose of showing practitioners the thought process behind identifying potentially good and bad projects.
Good Projects
Google will favor projects that use or generate information or data about people or things, so such projects are most likely to be successful and the most impactful. Such projects could include:
- Anything related to search – the original bread and butter of Google
- Anything related to the Internet of Things (IoT), where a lot of information needs to be organized in a global way. For example, Google is experimenting in one high profile project, the driverless car, where it can organize data and potentially make it universally accessible and useful
- Anything that improves the processes around the above two, such as improving the information retrieval, storage, or analysis processes
Bad Projects
- Content creation is unlikely to be a core competency of Google, which organizes content created by others
- Although hardware is required, it makes more sense that it would be outsourced to an organization that builds hardware as a key competency
Remember that projects can be well-aligned with missions and strategy but be poorly executed, and other projects may be poorly aligned but be well executed and still continue. However, only well-aligned projects are expected to contribute in a relevant way to moving the organization toward its mission objectives.
What do you think? What kinds of projects do you think align most closely with Google’s mission statement, and which not?
This post is part of the series: Influence of Mission Statements on Projects
A series of four articles on organizational mission statements and how they influence the types of projects which are likely to be successful. The articles look at how this might play out at Google, the U.S. Army, IBM and Facebook.
