Google Glass failure 'celebrated' in risk-taking culture

Google Glass has had its investment cut back resulting in a management reshuffle, but the failure is likely to be celebrated.

The high-tech eyewear that shares many of the functions of a smartphone has been discontinued as of 19 January 2015.

Patrick Pichette, Chief Financial Officer, Google, says: “Our projects start with small dedicated teams that are given clear milestones to hit before they can get further investments. And in cases where we achieve success against our milestones, we expand our investments.

“In other cases, when the teams aren’t able to clear hurdles, but we think there are still a lot of promise, we might ask them to take a pause and take the time to reset their strategies, as we recently did in the case of Glass.”

This is an indicator of Google’s company culture. Staff are constantly encouraged to be creative and lead new projects according to Aimee O’Malley, who heads up Google’s People Development in EMEA. Speaking to HR Grapevine recently she said: “We don’t want to be the bottlenecks, we want to be the catalysts.”

And even when projects don’t always succeed, she says: “Failure is celebrated. It’s ok to fail, and that is culturally encouraged.

“We just want people to fail fast, so that they don’t get stuck doing the wrong thing for too long because they are afraid to admit that it is not working. So failure, is encouraged – obviously we don’t want people to be constantly failing – but I think it’s culturally ok to admit your mistakes, say that didn’t work and move on to the next thing.”