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Google's success as a top media company has many people wondering about what its secret is and whether it can be emulated for similar results. Jeff Jarvis, who runs the Internet and media blog Buzzmachine.com, writes about media for The Guardian, and teaches at the City University of New York's Graduate School of Journalism, sought to answer that question in his book What Would Google Do? Jarvis “reverse-engineers” Google to discover the principles by which the company operates and then explores how those principles can be applied by other businesses. These principles include being a platform that helps other people do what they want to do (rather than what you want them to do), removing barriers to the flow of information and communication, operating according to an economics of abundance rather than an economics of scarcity, and taking advantage of network effects. Read the full book review on the Creative Cultures blog of IESE Business School professor Paddy Miller.
The Institute for Media and Entertainment (IME) and its operating partner IESE Business School recently interviewed Jarvis about his book. The conversation centered around how the shift to digital has affected industries such as media and advertising and how Google’s model upends legacy ways of doing business. Jarvis explains how Google is different—he contrasts Yahoo as “the last old-media company” and Google as “the first post-media company,” and he points to Google’s iterative innovation model whereby its users make its products smarter—and why companies would do well to follow its example in the new network-based economy.
Check out the video interview below. Or read the full transcript of the interview on Prof. Paddy Miller’s blog.
