WHAT WOULD GOOGLE DO?

With the possible exception of Apple, Google is probably the biggest corporate success story of the past decade. It’s adapted superbly to today’s fast-moving technological and economic changes. Its rivals have fallen one by one as it has risen. “It seems as if no company, executive or institution truly understands how to survive and prosper in the Internet Age. Except Google,” Jeff Jarvis writes in his new book. “So, faced with most any challenge today, it makes sense to ask: WWGD? What Would Google Do?”

Jarvis, a long-standing blogger at buzzmachine.com and a former magazine executive, answers his own question, creating a list of Google rules about how it achieved its tremendous success. They include: “Your customers are your ad agency,” “The mass market is dead – long live the mass of niches,” and “middlemen are doomed.”

Take his experience with a buggy Dell computer: “Each time I dared to contact Dell, I had to start from square one: Sisyphus on hold. I never made progress. It drove me mad. Finally, in hopeless frustration, I went to my blog . . . Then something amazing happened. At first, a few, then a score, then dozens and hundreds and eventually thousands of people rallied around and shouted ‘What he says!’ . . . Soon, my blog posts were appearing progressively higher in Google search results for Dell, reaching the precious first page, only a few slots behind the link to Dell’s home page . . . About this time, Dell’s vital signs began falling.”

Jarvis then looks at ways of applying these Google-derived rules to various other businesses, from restaurants (let your customers collaborate on menus) to newspapers (go post-paper) to lawyers and PR agents (sorry, he thinks these businesses are hopelessly non-Googley). I particularly like his advice to carmakers – open up the design process to customers: “A car company could take any existing brand and model and work with the community that already exists around it. . . . I lost count of the Facebook groups for BMW when I hit 500.”

Jarvis’ advice could help people in all sorts of businesses think about how to adapt to a changing world. But if I were Google, I’d view Jarvis’s book with mixed emotions. First, not even Google lives up to all of these rules as well as it should. Transparency – a key Jarvis rule – is often missing at Google. And the company’s famous “don’t be evil” guideline is under some stress from Google’s cooperation with the Chinese government.

But what should really make Google nervous is simply that it’s being held up as a company that can do no wrong. In my experience, when your firm becomes the model for books about how wonderful it is, that’s usually a warning sign. Remember when General Electric was the Goliath that couldn’t miss? Jarvis’s rules are interesting, but for most companies, the very characteristics that lead to their rise create the vulnerabilities that result in their fall.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is professor of law at the University of Tennessee and blogs at InstaPundit.com.