Sergey once asked a large assemblage of Googlers what our greatest corporate expense was. “Health insurance!” was one answer shouted back. “Salaries!” “Servers!” “Taxes!” “Electricity!” “Charlie’s grocery bills!,” came back others. “No,” said Sergey. “Opportunity cost.” He explained that the products we weren’t launching and the deals we weren’t doing threatened our economic stability more than any single line item in the budget. It became a regular call and response at staff meetings and added to the sense that no matter how hard we were working, success was slipping through our fingers. Rather than cause employees to feel defeated, however, it became a rallying cry to redouble their efforts.
In other words, "The opportunity cost of our employees sleeping and having lives outside work is our company’s greatest expense." How could that possibly encourage super-human commitment rather than induce demoralizing levels of despair?! Is this really a strong motivator if the prospect of having-a-cooler-project-at-work-than-any-spare-time-project-could-possibly-be is not? (I’m willing to consider the possibility that my mistake here is to assume that the average Google employee has a job as cool as mine in MSN Search.)
Arthur, I’m especially interested in your thoughts on this.
[Edit: fixed my misspelling of Sergey's name.]