Google guest speakers: A storm of innovation brews in the cloud

Undergraduate | Feb 23, 2017 | Jacqueline Herlan

What’s “googliness”? Go ahead and google it.

Or get the answer straight from the source.

“Googliness is that ‘above-and-beyond’ characteristic,” attributable to “the type of person who walks by a piece of trash on the ground, stops, picks it up, and throws it away.”

Ed Morris, FCRH ’92, head of sales at Google Cloud, and his colleague Ken Schiliro, director of sales, joined a recent Smart Woman Securities meeting to talk about how Google’s go-the-extra-mile culture fosters innovation at a high level.

Their discussion of Google innovation highlighted the company’s well-known self-driving car project, but they said other big things are happening worldwide. Among them are Project Lume, designed to bring internet access to third-world nations, and Google Contact Lens, which can manage blood-sugar levels for diabetics without pricking a finger.

How does all of this creativity carry through the company culture? On a weekly basis, Google offers TGIF, an open-forum discussion with founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, where anyone in the company can ask a question or spark a discussion. And Morris and Schiliro said that company “brainstorms” often feature the toothbrush question: Can a million people use the product twice a day?

To help future Google hopefuls, the duo provided a preview of the company’s hiring process. Google receives about 2.5 million applications each year for about 5,000 job openings. Morris and Schiliro suggested four attributes that might make certain candidates rise to the top of that very large pile: leadership, role-related knowledge, general cognitive ability, and, of course, googliness.