Blogware is finally accepting my blog post again…It took a while and it was extremely frustrating, but at least it’s working agian. So here’s the QOTW that I was trying to post for the past 2 days…

I’m back!!!

WOW…I can’t believe it’s been more than a month since my last “regular” blog post and even longer since my last podcast. Things at work became ABSOLUTELY HECTIC over the last few weeks/months and, even though I thought life would resume semi-normality after my big meeting on December 1-2, stuff just kept piling up—clearing the clogged inbox, presentations to give, meetings to attend, budgets to reconcile, etc, etc.

Anyway, I think I can finally breathe a (small) sigh of relief for now, so I’d better get blogging again while I still can…

To continue on a topic that I most recently discussed, I thought I’d kick-off my “return to blogging” with a QOTW from one of the opening events at the 2006 Web 2.0 Summit: A Conversation with Eric Schmidt (CEO, Google). You can also download the full audio (MP3) or video (MP4) podcast from the Web 2.0 Conversations page.

In this on-stage interview, John Battelle talks to Eric Schmidt about “…Google’s recent purchase of YouTube and the importance of video as a format… Why Google stood up to the request to provide end-user data… [And,] if Google is building an online suite to take on Microsoft Office.”

While the interview itself was quite interesting and fairly candid, I personally thought that the Q&A session—in the last ~10 mins of the podcast—was more revealing of Google’s philosophies and worth listening to for Schmidt’s insights on various topics.

So our QOTW comes in the form of Eric Schmidt’s answer to a question by an audience member that really taps into Google’s strength—attracting and retaining bright, innovative people.

Here’s the question:

“You guys are famous for having attracted and kept some of the smartest minds in business; period—what have you learned about attracting, developing, and keeping those folks that could help others?”

And here’s Schmidt’s answer…

The simplest answer is that people don’t work for money; they work for impact. And if you can figure out a culture where (1) you listen to the people and (2) that they have an impact, you have a winner.

Google is run in an unusual way. It’s very consensus-driven; we don’t have single decision makers; it’s hard to deal with and our partners have learned this, and we’re working as hard as we can to address that. But ultimately, the fact that everything is done in groups—people talk to each other and so forth and so on—has produced more robust decisions and greater buy-in.

Another way of saying that is: you tend to get better answers if you ask a question as a manager, rather than telling people the answer. So the way we do our strategy, for example, is we produce 29 questions for next year (which are reasonably obvious to people in this audience) and we send teams off to try to answer them, and we’ll see what they come back with. Much better than telling them the strategy—promotes buy-in.

I’m not sure if I agree 100% with the whole “consensus-driven” process, but I really like that Schmidt stresses the importance of getting internal buy-in for corporate strategy (“Gettin’ ETech Support” anyone?), as well as the need for “listening” and “”impact”. To me, this is the hallmark of the Web 2.0 movement, which is typified by the likes of Digg,Flickr, Facebook, and many other Web 2.0 companies, including Google itself.

From what I understand of these Web 2.0 companies, the founders didn’t set out to gain profit and fame from the start (although many eventually did). In fact, many were simply trying to build a better web app for themselves and mostly in their spare time (at least initially). So, instead of simply trying to build the next “hot app” and marketing the heck out of it, they listened to what their peers were saying about existing apps, sought to make them better and create an impact through innovation, and then ultimately obtained buy-in from users throughout the development process and beyond.

So I guess what I’m trying to say is that the issue of attracting and retaining good talent will always be an issue for expanding businesses, and particularly for major corporations of a reasonable size (like Google), where it’s easy to get lost in hierarchy. However, just like everything else in business, we should look to new and better models for people-management as well; and the Google playbook for this seems to be a really good one to follow.