A review of Jeff Jarvis’ book on the lessons from Google  

It’s not difficult, given the economic times that we’re in, to look to other companies and other industries for things that may be applicable to one’s business. Jeff Jarvis’ book, entitled What Would Google Do?, provides yet another insight into a company that has been one of the success stories despite the economy.

I picked the book up on one of my many business trips and expected to read yet another story of how Google has redefined the business model for a media company, how innovative the culture is, how the employees get all those great benefits, and therefore are highly motivated to be more innovative and dynamic than those employed by other organizations. While I found the book to be written in a rambling, stream of consciousness style (note: the book is one of the first in the industry written by a blogger who has ironically been gloating about the death of print), I was able to glean some value out of it. But a word to the wise: In order to do so, I found that I really needed to concentrate hard on the points Jeff was trying to make. At times it seemed that he was trying to stretch an idea into an entire chapter. Or perhaps it was the wine on the flight that made digesting the book tough. You decide.

Nevertheless, the success of Google is indisputable. Google is the first company in recent history whose name has transcended from a noun in normal English vernacular to a verb. We often say, “I’ll Google it” instead of “I’ll check on the Internet to see if I can find the answer.”

Google is certainly top of mind for the Internet search-engine consumer, or is it the millions of dollars of advertising that put them there? Actually, posits Jarvis, Google got that way because it centered its business on the customer.

Google gave its customer power—power to find exactly what they were looking for on the Internet and, more importantly, power to communicate honest feedback on Goggle’s products, no matter how negative that feedback was. And here’s the important part: Google would listen and make changes. Here’s a company with a culture that’s centered on looking for honest feedback from consumers–all in the relentless pursuit of improving its products and services.

Think about how often we, in our industry, take calls from customers complaining about a feature of their high-end whole-house entertainment system and, once the call is over, ignore—or  worse—discount what the end-user is saying.

I hear this particularly in the custom installation segment of our industry. When I talk with installers about the value of revisiting jobs that they completed six months ago—to ask a customer how they like their system—the installer often shudders and tells me that they don’t want to go back because they don’t want to hear it. No wonder many high-income end-users in our industry opt for an inexpensive, simple and de-featured whole-house entertainment system in their next home after spending close to a $100,000 on a high-end system that they never could get to work properly.

Listening, reacting and improving may seem like a basic concept for business, but it seems that in the tech industry we lose the customer in features and tech-speak. We don’t center our business on them. Yet the folks at Google took listening a step farther: It had people actively reading blogs (presumably Jarvis’) and website comments, and monitoring those comments about Google on the web in a concentrated effort to improve its products. 

Obviously there were other portions of the book that I did not find as applicable to our industry. Admittedly, Google is a new media company that makes most of its money from advertising revenues. Jarvis spent several chapters writing about speed—the speed of reacting to a customer issue, and the speed of developing new products to name two. It’s a lot easier to be fast with that kind of business model. But regardless of what industry you’re in, those who are quick to react in a slow economy,  regardless of size, often fare much better than those who are slow.

Could the book have been written better? Absolutely. Jarvis is a blogger, not an author, and it shows. But I did get some good ideas out of this book after wading through pages of rambling disorganization and wrote ideas down on a pad of paper. My advice? Get the CliffsNotes. Or better yet, go visit Google.

Petro Shimonishi is the Vice President of Business Development for Russound.