I'm a holiday nut...well really a holidy party nut. From the age of about 10 I've been organizing parties around holidays (any excuse to get everyone together in the backyard). I can throw a party in no time. Once when I actually forgot that I'd agreed to host a party until the first guest arrived...and still it was a great party.
I really love a good Easter party. Its so nice to be outside in the spring participating in vernal equinox fertility rites....like the hiding and hunting of the eggs. When my kids were small we used to pool families together and throw a really big Easter bash at Rancho San Antonio park in Los Altos. Some years we hid more than 300 eggs. Usually not hard-boiled and dyed eggs (nobody really wants to eat those, as it turns out) but colorful plastic or paper-mache eggs filled with candy and small trinkets and coins. Some years we did have some beautiful Ukrainian Eggs to hide, but they weren't for eating. In later years we filled the hollow eggs with colorful slips of paper that described what trinkets or candy the finder had won (insures that the chocolate doesn't melt before the eggs are found). We always hid several "special" eggs...really big ones with plush toys inside and "crystal" eggs with higher denomination money...and then there was the grand-prize "golden bunny". Finding him was worth $20 and gave you first pick of a partner for the raw egg toss!
If you were a grownup coming to our Easter bash you could choose to be a kid for the purpose of hunting eggs. We'd send all the "kids" off on a long walk together while we did the hiding. The ground where eggs were hidden was marked off with big pinwheels stuck into the grass. The little kids got to start hunting 10 minutes before the middling ones got to join for 10 more minutes, and then the big kids (some as old as in their 50s) could start.
The golden bunny was often the last to be found, and for some reason even though everyone looked hard for it, my son was most often the lucky finder. We were speaking today about how he went about finding it...he said he'd take a moment to "think like Mom" and he could usually figure out which hiding place I'd selected for the grand prize.
Many of the hidden eggs were cascarones (intact eggshells with the raw contents blown out through a hole in the bottom and then dyed bright colors and filled with confetti). So throughout all the egg hunting there would be periodic shreaks as somebody got a cascarone smashed on their head.
Then the hunt would be done and we'd all tuck in to a big potluck picnic lunch sitting on quilts laid out on the grass and soak up the sun. By early afternoon a wind would come up and we'd scurry to get everything back in the cars for the drive home.
By now you're asking what this could possibly have to do with Google, right?
Well, I have a lot of friends working on getting hired by Google just now, and I heard a story which convinced me that I might want to work there myself someday. It seems there was a Vice President-type position open and an acquaintance was interviewing for it. He'd gotten pretty far in the interviewing when he got tripped up by the following hypothetical: "Say its your first day on the job at Google, and you have 100 employees reporting to you. So, how would you spend your first day?"....
Of course any seasoned executive would spend it profitably, right? Interviewing the liutenants, getting to understand the current structure of the organization...WRONG!!! The correct answer (at Google anyway) was "Throw a Party!". No wonder everybody wants to work at Google! Wonder what they did at Google for Easter?
Actually, the "throw a party" makes a lot of sense. If you do a one-on-one with a person, it normally takes at least 5-15 minutes and sometimes can go even longer. Assuming you can keep each one-on-one down to 5 minutes a piece, you're talking about 500 minutes (not including overhead of time in between actually doing the one-on-ones, which could be even more than 5 minutes itself) or just over 8 hours -- a full work day.
Now, think about throwing a party for 100 people. You have them all in the same place at the same time (no switching from one person to the next overhead as in the one-on-one scenario). You can spend less than 5 minutes with a person and not feel bad: just keep walking the crowd.
This is a great story and teaches an important lesson about problem solving -- the "way we traditionally do it" and "the right way" are not necessarily the same. It's cool to hear that Google gets it.
Posted by: Dossy | March 28, 2005 at 06:05 AM