Google Founders talk about ending the 40 hour Work Week

Larry Page and Sergey Brin

You have to really give it to these guys !!

They did something as amazing as creating Google, one of those iconic products that like becomes a verb....... changes the world. And the best part, there’s still so much happening there, at a micro level and macro. 

At a micro level, I realize people are still learning all that Google can do. And at a macro level, Google is still bringing about change that can become another sociological shift.

First, an instance of the micro:

The other day in office, there’s this guy, Senthil, from Selco Mini Grids (I’ll tell you that story another day), who walks in and looks at a painting on the wall and he’s like, I wonder if it’s a Vinci or a Michael Angelo. I’m like, lets Google. He’s like, don’t overrate Google, this is a painting. I had the answer in less than a minute. For those of you who don’t know, it's an ap called Google Goggles, a picture recognition ap. You just need to click a picture and ask, and if it’s a known landmark or painting or celebrity, it’ll tell you. It was neither a Vinci nor an Angelo, but was a Sistine Madonna by an Italian artist called Raphael. . And in those five minutes of an inane conversation we had learnt something about art and also got to see some Vincis and Angelos too. That’s the level of knowledge availability that Google has enabled, right? 

Apparently, Peter Drucker observed in a 1992 essay for Harvard Business Review: 

“Every few hundred years throughout Western history, a sharp transformation has occurred, In a matter of decades, society altogether rearranges itself – its worldview, its basic values, its social and political structures, its arts, its key institutions. Fifty years later a new world exists. And the people born into that world cannot even imagine the world in which their grandparents lived and into which their own parents were born. Our age is such a period of transformation.”

For Drucker, the newest new world was marked, above all, by one dominant factor: “the shift to a knowledge society.”

For those interested, here’s the full article: What Peter Drucker knew about 2020

And I think Google has contributed to this in not a small way at all..... to the shift to a Knowledge Society through it’s mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful 

On the macro level:

What I really love about Google is that while being a technology and communication giant, it still keeps focus on the humane.

Here’s the latest:

A four day week! 

"If you really think about the things that you need to make yourself happy—housing, security, opportunities for your kids—anthropologists have been identifying these things. It's not that hard for us to provide those things," he said. "The amount of resources we need to do that, the amount of work that actually needs to go into that is pretty small. I'm guessing less than 1% at the moment. So the idea that everyone needs to work frantically to meet people's needs is just not true.

"You just reduce work time," Page said. "Most people, if I ask them, 'Would you like an extra week of vacation?' They raise their hands, 100% of the people. 'Two weeks vacation, or a four-day work week?' Everyone will raise their hand. Most people like working, but they'd also like to have more time with their family or to pursue their own interests. So that would be one way to deal with the problem, is if you had a coordinated way to just reduce the workweek. And then, if you add slightly less employment, you can adjust and people will still have jobs."

Huge potential sociological shifts there, huh?

While the world can wait for Google to show them the way, maybe we should at least think for ourselves, what say?