Companies adapt or fail when they enter a new market. McDonald’s understands the urgency, which is why the burger joint sells paneer wraps in India and shrimp sandwiches in South Korea.
Local laws, infrastructure challenges and consumer preferences require adjustments. But Google is contemplating something much deeper than a marketing or operational tweak in China.
Government partners want the Silicon Valley giant to compromise on its core values and purpose. Deliverables for the regime would include a censored search engine that would scrub history of unflattering information. Rather than recoil, Google has quietly complied through a project called Dragonfly.
If successful, political threats like Winnie the Pooh and the letter N could disappear in China along with Google’s soul.
During its 20-year history, Google has prided itself on offering more than search. “Googliness,” the attribute used to screen job applicants, stands for a mashup of passion and drive — for exploring the limits of one’s creativity without external influences.
This spirit powered Googlers to team with Twitter and put together a service in a single weekend to help revolutionaries communicate with each other when the Egyptian government blacked out the Internet and other communication systems in 2011.
Google would flip sides in China, helping to quash dissent in a collectivist culture that values conformity.
Already, the country uses facial recognition technology and other tools to monitor its citizens and assign purity scores in a high-tech behavior modification campaign. The pilot program, which will move next to Beijing, punishes deviance such as jaywalking and rewards good deeds like donating blood.
People who follow the rules get moved to front of the line for jobs, gym memberships and other “green channel” perks, while troublemakers get publicly shamed and blocked from privileges like travel.
That is the opposite of Googliness. No matter how big the potential profit streams in a market of 1 billion Internet users, Google will pay a price if it aligns itself with the architects of such a scheme.
An open letter, signed by a growing list of concerned Googlers, flags the incompatibility of the two value systems and raises broader issues. “Our opposition to Dragonfly is not about China,” they write on Nov. 27, 2018. “We object to technologies that aid the powerful in oppressing the vulnerable, wherever they may be.”
Google should listen to its internal voice. As the letter suggests, the stakes are higher than just one project far from corporate headquarters.
When a company puts profit over purpose, it loses its ethos. It also loses many of its high performers.
These workers, hired at Google precisely because of their Googliness, aspire toward a shared mission that aligns with their individual purpose. They see money as the reward for their labor — not the reason.
Censoring viewpoint diversity from tech platforms is not what these people signed up for, so they will disengage. Some will exit the organization, which already has started.
The fallout may focus initially on business practices in China. But once Google goes down the slippery slope of policing speech on behalf of an authoritarian regime, the company will lose its resolve to protect individual liberties in any market.
That’s how knowledge spillover works. Expertise gained in one market never stays siloed when companies work across borders, which is usually a good thing.
Lessons learned in India, for example, teach Unilever how to develop local managers and decentralize the organization in other countries. In the case of Dragonfly, however, Google will acquire dark knowledge that will filter back to headquarters and poison the corporate culture at its source.
So the Google alarmists are right. Their protest is not about China. It’s about protecting individualism for society and Googliness for themselves.
Trade, like all relationships, requires partners to think about what value they provide to their counterparts. Adjustments must be made to ensure harmony. But individuals, organizations and nations cannot budge when it comes to the touchstones that define them.
As the Yoruba proverb warns: “A river that forgets its source will dry up.”
