What happened to change a company that once famously embraced the altruistic motto “Don’t be evil”? Stapleton identifies one major turning point: When Larry Page replaced Eric Schmidt as CEO in 2011. Her job in communications gave her a unique inside perspective on the impact of that critical transition on Google’s corporate culture. “Everyone would have said that Eric was the corporate guy and Larry Page was the pure tech guy,” said Stapleton. “Larry had incredibly lofty rhetoric about the company’s ambitions and his hopes that it would solve all the world’s problems.”
What actually happened was a significant shift in Google’s organizational structure, with every executive being given their own communications team. The marketing department ballooned. “I think it created a culture that was more corporate—the opposite of what Larry said he wanted to happen,” said Stapleton. “The company became much more complex and inefficient. The irony was Larry was calling this out: ‘We’re going to become sclerotic, and we’re going to stop innovating if the company gets too bloated.’ But that’s exactly what happened: Google became a bloated Borg. And all of a sudden, Google wanted to do cool branding, like Apple.”
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