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Google's Project Oxygen: Do Managers Matter?

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GOOGLE?S PROJECT OXYGEN: DO MANAGERS MATTER? 10

Google?s Project Oxygen: Do Managers Matter?
In 2008?Google?s prized engineering team expressed their hatred for managers, both in theory and in practice. ?Most folks in engineering think about management as a necessary evil,? Laszlo Bock, Google?s SVP of People Operations told Forbes in an interview by phone. Determined to appease disgruntled engineers, Bock tasked a subset of People Ops (a three-man team called the People Innovation Lab: PiLab) to design data-driven research that would settle once and for all whether management was a force for good or evil within the company?s ?do no evil? walls. In early 2009, statisticians inside the Googleplex embarked on a plan code-named Project Oxygen. This paper explores the findings of Project Oxygen by Prasad Setty?s PiLab team and examines its apparent limitations to propose that the published accomplishments and visions of globally successful leaders (read: CEOs), managers, and academicians be researched to answer the all-important question: how to create truly amazing managers?
Case Review
Google research found that not only are managers a critical component to corporate structure?but that?good?managers increased job satisfaction, retention and employment within their groups and the organization as a whole. That realization opened an entirely new pathway for research at Google: how do you identify what makes someone a ?good? manager, and more importantly, how do you make someone

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