Just finished reading "Don't be Evil" by @clairewaves I arrived at Google a bit after Claire (in 2009), and of course distinctly remember her signature in the weekly email. But I had no idea of the ghostwriting (writing internal executive comms) she was responsible for, and I gotta say it is a bit like seeing behind the curtain. I have known people who can call bullshit from afar, like Claire's brother; but I really did buy into the whole idea of "being Googley." To me it was a perfect fit for my own ethos: do good work, treat people fairly, stay humble, respect peers. You can call me naive, but for a person for whom these things are natural, it is extremely hard to compute that some people do it performatively. I genuinely believed it could be saved. I wrote an internal document, "Google, I love you", calling out underlying issues I saw and how it could be fixed (some I've posted about publicly: Perf elimination, Googlegeist changes). Of course now reading Claire's book, I see it was all an act in futility. The most interesting aspect of her book is the multitude of lenses. Her original lens: believing in the underlying Google mission. The lens of some of her colleagues: confronting unchecked power in a labor struggle. The lens of management: self-preservation. The lens of her colleague Celie: "It's a pro-Google movement". And finally Claire's shift in lenses. While many approached events like the walkout as pragmatists trying to address tangible, systemic issues, I saw Google culture rapidly fracture into two opposing, uncompromising lenses: 𝐑𝐡𝐞𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐜 𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐑𝐞𝐬𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐬: A growing faction viewing the culture through symbolic debates, high-minded language, and internal forum clout over tangible output. Wheel-spinning and posturing replaced solving hard problems. 𝐓𝐨𝐩-𝐃𝐨𝐰𝐧 𝐌𝐚𝐧𝐚𝐠𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭: Leadership viewing the culture purely through a lens of self-preservation. 𝐈𝐧𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐭𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐫𝐞𝐟𝐥𝐞𝐱 is a strange thing: it will seem to work with you in good faith - until you signal that the system itself isn't working. The moment you express how hard things are on the ground, the posture flips from collaborative to defensive. You instantly become a threat to be managed. The ones who viewed "being Googley" not as a political tool, but as a commitment to solving hard problems and making great software, debating each other, respecting each other - were stuck in the middle. Reading her book, I see that the shift of "Googley" from a core ethos into corporate rhetoric was in the making long before I realized, basically right as I arrived. As people get locked into these rigid lenses, they pull everyone else into them. They lose sight of what actually matters, what's important, and what reality is telling them - a classic case of corporate groupthink. There's a bit of whiplash in seeing there's no wizard behind the curtain, but reality always catches up eventually. If you haven't already, I recommend picking it up! elov8.com/t/a430