Google's Culture Clash

Recently The New York Times reported on DotOrg, a philanthropy founded in 2004 by Google and endowed with tens of millions of dollars. Its mission: to tackle major problems like climate change, global poverty and the spread of pandemic diseases. DotOrg would be unconventional. It would operate as a business, free of the constraints placed on other nonprofits. Seven years later, DotOrg is now involved only in engineering-related projects that are often the outgrowth of Google products. What happened?

A clash of cultures. A confrontation of two minds: non-profit humanism vs. engineering meritocracy. Simply put, the engineers at Google could not fathom that African health problems could not be resolved once and for all by applying a health algorithm derived from analysis of Google data.

The ambitions of DotOrg were vast: "to completely reinvent philanthropy and, in doing so, reinvent the world and address a hugely important set of problems with solutions only Google with its immense intellectual talent and resources could find by aggregating information." In short, Google engineers thought they had the solution to the world's problems, if only these problems would hew to their data analysis.

DotOrg is now a one-project philanthropy and most of its budget has been re-purposed. In the clash between engineers and development professionals, the engineers, who now have given up on the project because it no longer interests them, are the victors.