Giving Google Room to Dream Big Beyond Search

[Commentary] Google’s new corporate structure is a typically elegant way to reconcile founder Larry Page’s seemingly divergent ambitions. By creating a half-dozen (for now) adjacent companies that are each dedicated to solving a technological problem, the structure allows for both tactical narrowness and strategic breadth. In short, it lets Page focus. On everything. Google pioneered what has become the archetype of the modern Silicon Valley company — an engineering-driven culture in which internal hierarchies are suppressed, empirical evidence is prized and people are given wide leeway to work on problems that excite them, even if they seem far removed from a central corporate mission. Now, by creating a formal structure to enshrine the goal of working on far-ranging problems, Google (or, rather, Alphabet) is offering a template for the next evolution of a modern tech firm — one that can do a lot more in many different corners of the world, for better or for worse.