My friend and former colleague John Thomas once shared the following recommendation: When you have a beautiful piece of art, you should place it carefully in your home. Don’t put it in an obvious place that you will see every day, because you will habituate, and stop noticing its beauty. Instead, put it in a more obscure spot, that you won’t encounter all that frequently, so that every time you see it, you will gasp.
I wonder whether that would be a good way to run a company like Google, too. There are so many exceptional offerings, but you are confronted with them daily. And you stop gasping. And you start saying: “why don’t they have pomegranate flavored water today?” Maybe intermittent reinforcement would be better, so that there are surprises on some days and not others. When there are surprises daily, they stop feeling like surprises.
There is so much to discover, though, that there are still lots of opportunities for me to catch my breath, and delight in the fact that “Google offers THIS, too??” - -I have captured a few of these in photos.
We were at a meeting, and I noticed a dog park behind the building. Google is, by the way, a very dog-oriented company, with employees bringing in their well-mannered dogs many times a week.
Here was another wonder-worthy moment...There are (free) gum machines in Sunnyvale. Apparently the gum had an ingredient (xylitol) that is dangerous to dogs. Google influenced the manufacturer to change the recipe, so that if gum inadvertently falls to the ground and a dog eats it, he won’t become sick.
Note also the terraces (and the views) outside the Google NYC building.
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