Predictability: Blessing or Curse?

Marissa Mayer is the Vice President of Search Products & User Experience at Google. She said in a recent CNBC documentary on the company that what enticed her to join Google (she was the 20th employee to be hired out of the current 20,000) was the every day challenge of doing something she was not prepared to do.

You get ready to go to the office, get there and, the whole time, on the back of your mind you probably know what 90% the day is going to be like. Your day, your week, your month, quarter or even your year may be filled with predictability, certainty and fixed routines. A day may be pretty much a carbon copy of the next.

What Marissa meant is not that she was not prepared to do the job, but that, Google, as probably one of the most ground breaking companies ever, set the stage for her to have days filled with challenges and unpredictability. This may be encouraging to some and equally disturbing to others, especially the type of people who need to know what they are having for dinner next Thursday night. I know a few people like this. I`m sure you do, too.

Indeed, there has to be some kind of structure: Meetings, reporting and the like and some big picture type frame work to guide us daily toward a goal, be it key performance indicators, quarterly goals or budgets to meet regardless of what your day looks like. We do not want chaos. The Google headquarters in California have pool tables, a gym, a cafeteria, a swimming pool and even a place where employees can drop off their laundry...they don`t even need to go home. Yet no employee escapes the ultimate goal or the reason for them to be there in the first place: To produce quality products and services that will generate a profit.

Simple advice: Find new ways of doing things for better results. Locate that one activity that, if you did a bit differently, may give you better and bigger results.