Making it Work


Google’s famous 20% rule encourages its employees to spend 20% of their time working on ideas that interest them without worrying how the company would make money out of them. Of the huge number of mini-projects that Google launches, more than 60% fail. Yes, that’s a failure rate of more than 60%. So one guy told Eric Schmidt, Google’s ex-CEO, that the company’s attitude towards experimentation, trials and risk of failure didn’t make any sense:
“You tell employees to waste their time, 20% of the week, you have this strange management approach where people are treated like peers and you don’t mind failure. This makes no sense what so ever.”

If a company like Google has such a high failure rate, I felt that it explained why our education system never encourages us to take a chance, to try out something new (or something never tried before). If you’re that likely to fail, surely, it must be safer to play safe: do things by rote, repeat what’s already been done and proven, right?

Or were the other, handful of teachers who said things like “Trying something new or different will eventually lead to success” right? That always sounded like going to the other extreme to me. Too idealistic. Naive. I was too politically correct back then to say it, but I always felt that surely, not all kids could be smart enough to succeed by trying something new.

So what was Schmidt’s answer?
“It works for us.”

I guess that’s the hard part: making it work. Because there’s always a cost associated with the repeated attempts and failures along the way. The money lost. The time spent. The impact on your image. Making it work inspite of those losses: now, that’s hard.

So maybe our education system was doing the right thing after all. Playing it safe is really, well, the safer option. The boring but more likely way that most people will succeed.

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