CEO Larry Page is the current CEO of Google, and one of the company's co-founders, along with Sergey Brin. The rampant success of Google in its short life makes it one of the most fascinating companies, and even during the period where Page was not CEO he was a strong influence over the company. Google is the market leader in three critical technologies -- search engines, browsers and mobile operating systems -- is the number one advertising marketer in the world and has also been named as the best company to work for. Google is essentially a paradigm-shifter for business in America and that is why taking a closer look at Larry Page and how the company runs its business is worthwhile.

Page grew up in Michigan, where his father was an important computer scientist. Thus, he had access to technology at a very early age and was raised in an environment conducive to learning about computer technology. He attended the University of Michigan where he earned a degree in engineering and moved onto to Stanford, where he studied computer engineering and met Google co-founder Brin. Google was created as a research project, which was aimed at organizing the immense amount of information on the web, under the principle that the most popular search engine results would also be the most useful (A+E, 2013). The company was launched in 1998, went public in 2004 and has grown rapidly ever since.

Organizational Culture

Google has fostered a unique organizational culture, led by Page and Brin, and this culture is directly related to many of the company's achievements. His leadership style is casual and loose, but this is a something that can be interpreted the wrong way. Google's culture does not emphasize driving employees to make incremental gains, but freeing employee to make quantum leaps. Page has instilled this philosophy throughout the organization. He personally believes that Google products should be ten times better than those of the competition, and that incremental improvements are insufficient (Levy, 2013).

The corporate culture at Google is therefore designed to free the company from the constraints of a focus on incremental improvement. Employees are encouraged to spent some company time working on their own projects, and will often be allowed to pursue products even when there is a no discernable way to make money from them. This is a different approach to most companies, but it contributes to a culture where creativity and innovation are more highly valued than mere operational excellence. This culture increases the likelihood of the sort of transformational change that can allow a company to leapfrog its competition.

A key element of Page's leadership is his ability to balance the need for quantum leaps with the need for a sense of direction and business focus, Prior to him taking back the reins of the company, it had lost a little bit of focus, with many projects sitting around either unfinished, unviable for both. He streamlined these efforts to maintain business focus and redeploy organizational resources. Another thing he did with the culture was to emphasize communication, ensuring that senior managers were able to work closely with each other every day in a set location, in order to remove physical barriers to communication among his top people (Stone, 2012).

The corporate culture at Google is a direct reflection of Page's leadership style. Indeed, where previous CEO Eric Schmidt was brought into the company to give it more corporate focus, Page takes the company back to its entrepreneurial roots. He still emphasizes innovation but is quicker to cut failing products, and his focus on rapid decision making is very much a means of re-instilling entrepreneurial culture. At the same time, his streamlining has renewed the sense of focus for the company. These are all direct reflections of Page's values that have become a part of Google culture.

Personal Values

Page's personal values are basically the same as Google's. The company is young and he has always remained in an influential position with the company. The company's values align closely, therefore with those of the two co-founders. Page believes in things like communication, free flow of information and the power of technology to help people. These values are important for the company and drive a lot of Google's culture and emphasis on innovation. Many of the company's products, for example, are developed with helping people in mind. The search engine was developed to help better organize the information on the Internet. Android was developed out of the idea that operating...

The company is now developing a self-driving car, again with the idea that this will be helpful (Carlson, 2013).
It is not surprising that Page's personal values have become so ingrained in Google, as this is primary a company that was built in his image. As Google has grown, so too has Page's involvement. He drives the agendas at the company, so Google directly reflects his values and ambitions, including many of the new projects that the company is working on, seeking the sort of bold new inventions that would transform society (Carlson, 2013).

Ethics

The values of the CEO are likely to influence the ethical behavior within the organization. There have been studies on this subject. For example, transformational leadership styles -- essentially the style that Page works with -- are correlated with changes in ethics, showing that such leaders have a strong influence of the ethics within the organization (Hood, 2003). This is because the leader is often visibly in favor of a particular approach to ethics, and champions that approach. The high degree of personal influence that transformational leaders have within their organizations manifests itself in strong ethical frameworks that are adopted throughout the organization. Older work also shows CEOs impose their ethics and values throughout the organization via their choices in organizational design, strategy and resource allocation (Lewin & Stephens, 1994).

Page has therefore influenced the ethical behavior of Google in a number of ways. Consider two of the company's recent ethical issues -- the privacy issue with Google Street View and the freedom of information issue with the Chinese government. Google has a strong cultural belief that freedom of information is something that will empower humans. This belief trumps other issues, creating ethical dilemmas for Google. Privacy of the individual is held as much more important a value by some people than freedom of information and the result is that these values tend to clash. For Google, the dilemma is resolved by a set of ethics that puts information first, over things like individual privacy or the Chinese government's desire to control its people and limit their access to information.

Strengths & Weaknesses

Page has a number of strengths. He has a clear vision of what he wants to accomplish with his company, he has tremendous drive, and he has a good sense of balance with respect to the entrepreneur/innovator side of his personality and the business organization and leadership side. That is a powerful combination. With respect to weakness, it is hard to point to anything much in a leader who has created arguably the most successful company in the modern age. He has not failed much, which is to suggest that his weaknesses have not yet been revealed. That Page has not been tested with failure is one weakness for certain -- maybe he cannot handle adversity. We do not know because he has never really faced it. As a leader, he has a lot of very intelligent and creative followers and a high level of inspirational qualities. He does leave a lot of the transactional leadership to others, but that is probably just good delegation skills.

I suspect that it is the combination of his key strengths that has led to his success. This is not ordinary business success, so you are not going to have this level of success without a whole lot of great attributes and quite frankly without a lot of luck and good breaks along the way. Having drive, motivation and the ability to balance those two things got Google off to a great start, but it also made it difficult for the company to rest on its laurels. Google has become the juggernaut it is today with a combination of three traits that are hard to find together, along with access to a tremendous amount of resources (Carlson, 2013).

Power & Politics/Communication and Collaboration

The former is more important than the latter. Communication and collaboration are at the heart of how Google succeeds. First, the company is highly centralized in California and most of its branches are little more than sales offices. Page also set up an office for the C-suite people so that they could all work together for a set time each day. This specifically removes the physical barriers to communication that have emerged as the company has become bigger, taking it back to its fast-moving entrepreneurial roots. The company's ability to bring in top talent and then foster collaboration has always been one of its most successful attributes. Allotting time for…