Small Teams Facilitate Innovation
Google's structure is so light because Brin and Page wanted to reduce the coordination and administrative costs that hamper engineers and reduce the time devoted to innovation. Time spent reading and writing proposals, negotiating, explaining choices, ensuring instructions are understood and followed, and enforcing policies is time taken away from inventing.
Google accomplishes this feat using several parameters simultaneously. I've already discussed one innovation, the 20 percent rule for personal projects. But another important innovation is Google's use of small, autonomous teams.
Google certainly didn't invent the concept of small teams. The group that developed the first Apple Macintosh consisted of no more ...
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