"If we can't win on quality, we shouldn't win at all" Google's co-founder Larry Page told the company's new brand manager, Douglas Edwards. And quality at Google, Edwards was to learn quickly, rests solely with the brilliant engineers Google was hiring as fast as it could find them.

In his new book, I'm Feeling Lucky: Confessions of Google Employee Number 59, Edwards tells the story of Google's formative years, as it zoomed from an unknown late-comer to the search engine field to the dominator of search, email, advertising and many other online activities. While the book is more than an ode to the glories of brilliant engineering--there are lots of insider stories of human excesses and engineers run-amok--I found myself noting how frequently the Google story centered on its remarkably strong engineering ethic. I found five central characteristics that seem to me to be central to Google's engineering ethic.

While they may seem to apply best to a technology company--especially a startup where everyone sees a chance to become an overnight millionaire--these principles could help any organization that feels stuck in the status quo.

1. Branded by Engineering
Though he was Google's brand manager, Edwards makes no claim to building the Google brand. "The brand was built on product, and the product was built by engineers," Edwards declares from the outset. The product that distinguished Google in seach back then and continues to keep them ahead of the competition today, is Google's PageRank algorithm, which was the first to look at in-bound links to a web page as a measure of the page's relevance to a user's search.

Google started in 1996 as a joint research project by Stanford grad students Larry Page and Sergey Brin. They called their project "Backrub" and changed the name to Google in 1997, based on the mathematical term googol, a very large number (10¹⁰⁰). They moved the operation to a friend's garage and incorporated in September 1998. In 1999 they received $50 million in startup funding from two of Silicon Valley's leading venture capital firms.

2. Efficiency Valued Above All
"Efficiency, I would learn very quickly, is valued highly among those who live to make things better," Edwards observes. It was likely this nearly ruthless dedication to efficiency that made Google so disruptive to so many businesses, undercutting the less-efficient advertising model, for example, that had allowed newspapers and magazine to thrive for a very long time.

"Engineers rebel at inefficiency," Edwards writes. "Larry Page more than anyone I ever met, hated systems that ate hours and produced suboptimal results. His burning passion was to help the world stop wasting his time."

3. The Fast Change Imperative
This drive for quality and efficiency leads Google's engineers to another game-changing characteristic of their business model: fast, frequent small changes to their product that would enhance its value to the user.

"Our engineers made quick data-based decisions and implemented them. If the numbers said changing A to B would improve product X, why not do it now," Edwards asks. He sees this urgent mindset to change things now as the driving force of Google's success. "Engineers knew how to make things better, and every minute, every second we delayed improvements, users had to endure sub-optimal interactions with our site."

4. Build the Team
Urs Hölzle is a brilliant Swiss engineer who heads Google's engineering department. Edwards writes that Hölzle's greatest accomplishment was "building the team that built Google." One of the toughest lessons for many people--especially for those who have been highly effective at their craft, whether it's engineering, or selling or writing ad copy--is to leverage that skill through others. Edwards tells how Hölzle continually urged his staff to extend themselves through others:

"Your greatest impact as an engineer," he would tell them, "comes through hiring someone as good as you or better... because over the next year, they will double your productivity. There's nothing else you can do to double your productivity. Even if you"re a genius, that's extraordinarily unlikely to happen."

5. Grow the Company
Companies must grow to keep faith with their engineering ethic. It's not just about profits and satisfying shareholders. Sure, if you don't show quarter-to-quarter earnings growth, your stock gets hammered. But the Google story suggests another, more basic reason why companies have to grow. If you're not growing, you can't build a team. If you're not growing, you can't continue to innovate and push forward quickly with new improvements to your product. If you're not growing, there is little your engineers can do to build the higher quality that builds a higher brand value.

Google went public on August 19, 2004, and by March 4, 2005, Edwards departed Google, having hit "the startup jackpot." He no longer needed to work for the money, and it seems he no longer saw a role for himself at Google that was worth the struggle. He concludes that impatience remains Google's one big flaw: "impatience with those not quick enough to grasp Google's vision." Now that the company is so big and so dominant in so many areas of the Internet, their impatience is more likely to be perceived as arrogant and even sinister.

Yet Edwards admits that after Google he finds himself more impatient with "the way the world works." He asks:

• Why is it so hard to schedule a DVR recording
• Why aren't traffic signals timed to optimize rush hour traffic flow
• Why does the customer service representative ask for your customer number after you"ve already keyed it in for the robot that answered the your call

"These are all solvable problems," he concludes. 'smart people, motivated to make things better, can do almost anything. I feel lucky to have seen firsthand just how true that is."

- "I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59" by Douglas Edwards is available in hardcover at Amazon.com for $15.62. I downloaded the Kindle version for my iPad for $14.06.

Don Dunnington
Blog Moderator

Charles Fishman worries about our water ignorance. Water is present everywhere we look; yet we know so little about it. 

Our languages are full of water words and metaphors. Our cultures and religions are filled to the brim with water stories and symbols. In the Western world, for the last hundred years nearly all urban (and now rural) residents can turn a tap—even in a desert—and water comes gushing into our glasses, our tubs, our showers and pours out on our lawns and gardens, with no effort by us and at so little cost as to seem free.

A Global Water Tour
Fishman sets out to cure our ignorance in a breathless recitation of water facts and extended tours of water use and misuse from the desert water fountains and golf courses in Las Vegas to a drought-stricken Atlanta, Georgia. From Southern California to New Delhi to Australia, Fishman tells the many stories of today's droughts and floods and the long history of water's impact on societies. Reading Fishman's accounts of how we use and misuse water, we're reminded of how large the distribution and use problems are and how little we seem to be able deal with them, even with disaster staring us in the face.

Fishman points out that while watersheds are very large systems, unlike other global environmental issues, the problems in one water basin do not spill over into another system. So he takes us on a journey through many different systems, and many different sorts of users. We visit IBM's huge water ultra-purification system in Burlington, Vermont, where they need a staggering amount of super-pure water to produce computer chips. We learn how wool washing profoundly impacts the water supply in arid Australia, and how a leading wool processor has devised ways to save prodigious amounts of water and money.

The Ultimate Trivial Pursuit for Water Enthusiasts
If you have an appetite for water factoids, Fishman has a smorgasbord of delights for you:

• Water is never destroyed or used up. Today we're drinking the same water the dinosaurs drank. (Is that Tyrannosaurus Rex pee in your glass?)
• Water is the lubricant that allows the continents to move
• A 150-pound man is 90 pounds water
• The average American flushes 18.5 gallons of clean drinking water down the toilet every day
• An IBM chip factory in Vermont uses 3.2 million gallons of water a day
• In water-short Australia, a single wool processing factory uses 380,000 gallons of water daily
• Also in Australia, a farmer pours 6 billion liters of water over 10,450 acres of rice fields
• A two-liter bottle of coke takes five liters of water to produce it.
• 49 percent of water use in the US is for power plants
• The electricity you use at home requires 250 gallons of water per person per day
• 1 ton of steel takes 300 tons of water
• At lift-off the space shuttles used one million gallons of water per minute (not to keep it cool but to buffer it against being shaken apart by the noise)
• Of the world's 6.9 billion people, 1.1 billion don't have adequate water
• 5,000 children die every day from lack of water or diseases from tainted drinking water

And it goes on. Many of the more interesting tidbits are about the science of water, some of which remains a mystery to those who study it. When it comes to solutions for the way households, industries and farmers use water, Fishman doesn't offer a prescription. He seems to favor market pricing that would force all water users to be more prudent, and provide an incentive for industries to be more productive in their water use.

We Pay for Essential Things
"Except for air and water," he notes, "…we pay for almost everything else in life that is essential; we entrust everything, from electricity to hospitals, to private companies." But in a bow to the Hollywood view of private companies, Fishman worries a few pages later that "…it's also vital not to let business get so far ahead that we cede the future of water to commercial interests."

Despite his wavering on how far to trust business, Fishman more often than not seems to come down on the same side as the businesses that must devise and produce the technical solutions to maintain our lifeline to water. "Technology is making it easier to solve almost any water problem," he declares. The real problem is getting the people and their political leaders to recognize the problems, and understand and accept the technical solutions (such as getting over the yuck-factor of drinking recycled water).

As Fishman points out early and often in his very readable and informative book, "…running out of water is like slipping off the edge of a cliff—it's hard to be saved." Fishman wants us to save ourselves before it's too late to be rescued.

- The Big Thirst by Charles Fishman is published by Free Press (400 pages). I bought it as a Kindle eBook on Amazon for $12.99.

Don Dunnington
Blog Moderator

Last week, two possibly world-changing launches took place: On Tuesday Seth Godin introduced his latest book Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? The next day Apple introduced the iPad.

Most observers instantly declared both fabulous, though a few found fault with some iPad details. You’d have to be on an extended trip to another planet to miss the news of Apple’s iPad, the long-anticipated tablet computer that may do to book, magazine and newspaper publishing what iTunes did to the music business.

The buzz on Seth’s new book is nearly as intense in the blogging/marketing world he inhabits, but the news may have missed those beyond that world.

Seth Godin is a prolific writer with ten books and one of the longest-running, most-read and most influential blogs of all time. Many are already declaring Linchpin the most important book Godin has written, that it will be life changing for those who read it and world changing for the works that ensue.

This post is not a book review, or a review of Apple’s latest cool technology. It’s an alert. It’s a sign of new possibilities in the midst of all our angst over economies and policies and things that may blow up with little or no warning and we’re standing too close.

This week Steve Jobs and Apple demonstrated once again that we can still invent cool tools that are fun to use, and in the process transform whole industries. And this week Seth Godin introduced us to a Manifesto of Fabulous: a guide, a map and an energizer for how each one of us, individually and collectively can make our own fabulous things.

You can find a hint of what was to come in his new book in this brief post from his blog dated November 8, 2009. It’s titled simply "Fabulous"

This is so cool: because we only look at things we want to look at, only talk about things worth talking about, the amount of fabulous in the world continues to rise exponentially.

Even though we're at the tail end of the great recession, think about all the cool stuff in your life. Not just stuff you can buy, but experiences, works of art, innovations of all kinds... the bar has been raised for what you need to do to be noticed, and the market is responding.

Not only do I notice more fabulous, but it sure seems as though the creators of it are more engaged, dedicated and yes, joyful, than I can remember. If there was ever a moment to follow your passion and do work that matters, this is it. You can't say, "but I need to make a fortune instead," because that's not happening right now. So you might as well join the people who can say, "I love doing this."

Fabulous Infrastructure and Machines
There's a lot of talk of our transformation from an Industrial Age to a Digital Age. In this post-industrial era, some suppose there's little change or innovation to be found when it comes to engineering water or wastewater projects, or the industrial equipment that's used in building and running those installations.

Yet for those who bother to look there's a wealth of innovation—of fabulous people designing and building fabulous equipment:

• I’ve seen fabulous digital weighing technologies designed specifically for process control. These Smart Force Transducers are developed and manufactured in Niederlenz, Switzerland, and they are just one example of how digital instruments are applied in industrial equipment.
• In an article on how innovation turbo-charges industrial companies I profiled Jim Foley in Pitman, NJ, who headed the team that developed a new material flow aid for gravimetric feeders.
• Fabulous water projects have a long and storied history, the evidence of which can be seen in places like Pont du Gard, France, where a Roman era aqueduct from 19 BC still stands. The city of Rome itself had eleven aqueducts constructed over a period of 500 years.
• Philadelphia's Fairmount Water Works was the site of the world's first high-pressure steam engine. The project got its start in 1790 when Ben Franklin left the city 100,000 pounds to develop an abundant supply of water.In 1805 Philadelphia's Watering Committee began work on a collection of Federal and Greek revival buildings that housed steam engines and later water wheels and turbines powered by the Schuylkill river. The buildings were surrounded by formal gardens, attracting tourists, painters and photographers from around the world. After a visit from England in 1842, Charles Dickens wrote, "In Philadelphia there is a place that is wondrous to behold, and that is the Philadelphia Waterworks."

The point of these examples is that people have been creating every day things filled with fabulous ideas and designs for a very long time. Today there are more people than ever who dare to reach beyond the common to set new standards in their fields. Godin thinks a new wave is coming that will sweep away today's other trend, the one taking us toward the age of the commodity. Those who buy and read Linchpin may find themselves among those riding at the top of this wave. He says that would be fabulous.

Don Dunnington
Blog Moderator

Book Review
"The Last Taboo: Opening the Door on the Global Sanitation Crisis"
By Maggie Black and Ben Fawcett
Published 2008 by Earthscan, UK and USA

Despite its subject matter (human waste), "The Last Taboo" is a surprisingly readable and interesting book, even for the lay person, and it challenges the currently fashionable focus among those who fund such projects on providing third world peoples with clean drinking water. The authors, Maggie Black and Ben Fawcett, seek to reframe the discussion toward fixing the underlying problem of human sanitation. The book was funded by UNESCO and offers an extended analysis of the connection between human fecal matter, water contamination and disease.

The authors suggest that while most of the developed world's attention is focused on the need for clean drinking water in the undeveloped world, the more basic problem of preventing contamination of drinkable water by human waste is largely ignored. The authors see this situation as an environmental and human health time bomb, especially in third world mega cities where official counts have climbed to over 10 million residents and millions more go uncounted. At least a billion people, one sixth of the world population, now live in and around these mega cities in dwellings that lack adequate sanitation. At the current rate of rural migrants leaving home to find work in these cities, "The moment is expected sometime in 2008, when humanity will become a mainly urban instead of a mainly rural species."

Making matters worse, the authors cite the strong tendency in developing countries to undercount the poorest urban dwellers. These undercounted folks are also underserved when it comes to sewage systems. They frequently occupy squatters' quarters or floating slums outside official city limits and outside any semblance of sewage disposal. In seeming contradiction to this urban squalor, the World Bank and other funding sources have been concentrating on rural areas in the third world with the apparent hope that they might thereby reverse migration to the cities.  While appearing to address a great need, this rural focus leaves neighboring mega cities to continue to fill up with rural migrants and no sewage systems to serve them.

The authors offer an enlightening, even entertaining, history of human sanitation from Roman times to London's cholera epidemics and beyond. Until John Snow applied scientific methodology to determining how cholera spread in London in an 1854 epidemic, wild theories thrived.  Miasma, or bad air, led the list of causes for much of Western history.  Nobody considered  human fecal matter to be  a contaminate which  caused  disease. It was a terribly smelly problem, and especially bad in hot and overcrowded dwelling areas of cities.  

By the 1850s and '60s, the unsanitary conditions in parts of London had become so bad that politics, if not smell, finally brought action to clean up the poorest areas of the city. It may have been more fear of revolution, now rampant in much of continental Europe, that prompted London to do something about delivering clean water and sewage disposal even in the poorest neighborhoods.

The most basic of human needs – sanitary living conditions, appropriately safe,  private places for disposing of fecal matter and accessible running water – continue to be unavailable to much of the world's population.  

In the last chapter, "Bringing on the New Sanitary Revolution," the authors address the question of if we build enough toilets for the urban poor, will they use them. The answer is a qualified yes: people tend to adopt cleaner living habits when they have the oprion to do so. The authors seem to hold great hope in particular for educational efforts where children, though their good example and social pressure, become the change agents for the entire community.

Bringing modern, affordable sanitation to millions of poor urban residents in Africa, Asia and Central and South America poses both a terrific problem and a wonderful opportunity for those who are able to supply the solutions. Although the problem areas are easy enough to find on a map, solutions can come from anywhere. This huge human sanitation problem presents us with an opportunity to  improve  health and productivity among a significant portion of the world's inhabitants. 

The book is available on Amazon.com, click here for more information.

Don Dunnington
Moderator

In "Great Lakes for Sale: From Whitecaps to Bottlecaps," Dave Dempsey makes a case for a regional effort to make sure these waters are not for sale to or controlled by interests outside the region. While a system holding 18 percent of the world's -- 95 percent of the US -- fresh surface water supply may never be pumped dry, Dempsey worries its water level could be tragically lowered by those who would export to thirsty neighbors, domestic and foreign.

Dempsey comes from Michigan, which he points out is surrounded by three of the Great Lakes. And he sees the lakes as one of the state's greatest treasures. "Michigan's economic future and its health rests on attracting people to live and work here rather than shipping the water to where people now are," Dempsey said in an interview with Dome, the University of Michigan's online magazine.

From Rustbelt to Sunbelt
Dempsey points to Sunbelt governors, including New Mexico's Governor Bill Richardson, as covetous of Great Lakes waters for their booming population and economic growth. He sees a zero sum game, where the Rustbelt's Great Lakes treasure is exported to the Sunbelt.

To his credit, Dempsey acknowledges that the Great Lakes watershed is continuously replenished, with the rare exception of a dry year. More critically, however, Dempsey only skims over the fact that the Great Lakes region, with its declining populations, continues to use more water than parched but growing Southwestern states. Those living in an area of abundant water have been far less inclined to conserve water, such as installing toilets that use less water.

A Threat by Bottle, Truck or Pipeline
Dempsey proclaims a passionate belief that Great Lakes waters should be kept in the region. He sees bottling, trucking or pipelining of the water to other states or countries as a violation of 200 hundred years of public trust.

He provides a detailed history of the complicated nature of Great Lakes conservation and economic forces. Sometimes conservationists set the agenda and other times corporate interests do so.

He cites a Nestle Corporation public relations campaign in support of bottling Great Lakes water as an illustration of how corporate interests can reframe the argument for selling Great Lakes water. Somehow what goes out in little Perrier-sized bottles seems less offensive to the public than running a giant aqueduct from Michigan to New Mexico.

Dempsey sees the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as a possible threat to his cherished lakes. Certain provisions could allow the Great Lakes to be considered a commodity in some foreign trade agreements.

According to Dempsey's analysis of legal and political efforts, private interests, whether foreign or national, pose a threat for Great Lakes conservation. So far, they have been unsuccessful but he worries about how long this will be the case.

For Political Junkies
For such a thin book (just 107 pages including end notes), Dempsey devotes an overabundance of space to local Michigan politics.

He joined Democrat Michigan Governor Blanchard's staff in 1983, and he shares the sort of detailed blow-by-blow account of political process that only a political junkie could follow. He also displays an obvious distrust of commerce and places great faith in the protective powers of government.

Is Water the Next Oil?
Dempsey cites a Bloomberg News item from July 3, 2006, which describes how T. Boone Pickens, the Texas hedge fund manager and oilman, spent $50 million for water rights around his 24,000 acre North Texas ranch. "He compared the demand for water to China's purchases of oil fields from Canada to Kazakhstan, saying, ‘I'd be the same about water.'"

So could Michigan and the rest of Great Lakes water basin become the Saudi Arabia of water? That would be Dempsey's worst nightmare.

The book is available on Amazon.com, click here for more information.

Don Dunnington