Diversity Action Plan

Google, Inc.

What does it mean to be diverse? Does society paint a clear picture of the true meaning of this word? Most people think diversity has to deal with race, age, gender and religion. Society has put a cap on the true and full meaning of diversity. Having a diverse organization goes deeper than the ethnic make up of the employees. This paper will discuss the diversity action plan for the Google Corporation. This paper will discuss the history of the company and its diversity, the meaning of diversity and an action plan of diversity.

What is Google? Can it be found in a dictionary? Google is a web site that many people use every day to search for anything that his or her heart desires. More than one person has probably pondered about the meaning of Google. Well the name is a made up word but comes from a very real word indeed. Its origin comes from the word Googol which is a mathematical term meaning 1 with 100 zeros following it. The company adopted the name because they believe that they were trying to organize information that came endlessly like the number 1 with 100 zeros (Company Overview 2007).

The Google Corporation is one of the biggest and most popular search engines on the internet. Larry Page who was 24 and Sergey Brin whom was 23 did not like one another when they first met as college students at Stanford University in 1995. They disagreed with every topic they discussed, except their major, computer science. Larry enjoyed building electronics and he gained some notoriety for building a printer completely out of Lego blocks. In their dorm room when they first met to discuss their plans for creating an internet search engine they came up with a company called backrub. Backrub gave back links to web sites. A year later the idea was doing well and people were using it all round campus.

In 1998 they began to buy a terabyte of disks and built the computer housings for Google. Larry’s dorm room became Google’s first data center. Sergey began to set up an office and called on potential business partners who might want to license the idea. Among those people was David Filo the founder of Yahoo. He agreed that they had a solid idea but would not help them until they had it under way. They had to put their education on hold and go in at it alone sine they could not find a partner. First they had to get out of the dorm room and find a suitable office. So they wrote up a business plan and started looking for an investor. While searching for an investor they ran into Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems. After giving him a quick demo he walked out leaving Google, Inc. a check for $100,000. This created a dilemma for the guys because technically there was no such thing as Google, Inc. As weeks went by they scrambled to establish a company so they could cash their checks.

In September of 1998 Google, Inc. was established the first headquarters was in a garage in Menlo Park, California. They then hired Google’s first employee Craig Silverstein, who now works as the company’s director of technology. As the new company was establish they began to answer 10,000 search inquires a day. They were then listed as the top 100 websites in 1998.

By February 1998 the company had then grown to 8 employees and moved out of its garage to a more suitable office. They were starting to answer about 500,000 search inquiries a day. Then on September 1, 1999 Google’s Beta Label came off. Technology companies like Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and others all start off with beta labels. This means that they are still undergoing experiments to prove their reliability. This is done by another smaller group of people and does not happen within the company. It took Google three years to shed their label and when they did they used it as a good way to market their company even further to success.

The atmosphere at any of Google’s headquarters still has the small office feel. The offices and hallways are painted using funky art with primary colors. The employees do not sit in every day office chairs, but in big globe chairs, and bean bags. Most offices are equipped with couches and an office pet. The lobby is furnished with a piano, lava lamps, and a huge screen of current searches. The employees can use the workout room that is equipped with exercise equipment as well as ping-pong table, pool tables, and foosball tables. The company also hosts roller hockey twice a week out in the parking lot. If that is not enough they also have a cafÐ"© with five restaurants and snack bars with bens that are filled with anything delicacy imaginable. These services are both free!

Google is worldwide and is greatly diverse; many of the employees speak other languages. The employment policy is very lax; they tend to hire people who have the ability versus the education. The employees are given several opportunities to learn different cultures to include free language classes. For those reasons who; would not want to work for Google, Inc. Google is one of the best companies to work for.

What is the full meaning if diversity? A survey was given my The Black Collegian Magazine regarding diversity. They asked MBA and undergraduate students what was diversity. The majority of the group associated ethnicity with the term. This association was strongest for American Indian/Alaska Native MBA students (89%) and least commonly selected by Asian-Indian MBA students (67%) (Definitions 2006). “Gender” was the second most common association across the board for all survey groups. The true definition of diversity is not represented by this survey. How can one expect to live in a diverse society if the meaning is not fully understood? This topic is discussed frequently and is crucial to the success of any corporation. The key to a thriving business is diversity. Operating as a diverse workforce allows a company to expand their horizon. Being able to identify with employees and clients will boost opportunities. Not only will being diverse improve employee retention but also could also increase consumer opportunity and retention.

This is what Google says about diversity: "Diversity plays a large role in the way we're developing our engineering organization around the world. We're building a large worldwide office presence to establish ample global representation among our engineers, and we're applying that same focus to establish a balanced representation of employees at Google. In the end, these efforts help us more accurately and relevantly represent our users, and our continued success depends on the best minds working from different perspectives and insights."

Alan Eustace - Google SVP, Engineering & Research (Google Celebrates 2007). . Every company should have