Google turned out quite a dazzling display of data recently when it released its third-quarter results: Profit jumped 46 percent. Revenue soared 57 percent. The company’s shares shot up $6.14, to more than $639 each, on the news. But it’s another set of figures that most impresses me: 17, $0, and 20 percent.
These refer, respectively, to the number of cafés at Google’s Mountain View (Calif.) campus; what it charges employees for all the meals and snacks eaten there; and the amount of time it encourages its engineers to carve out each week to tackle company-related projects that interest them personally but aren’t part of their core assignments.
More than any enterprise I know of, Google ...
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