Big Ahha

I often use this phrase when working with clients. I use it when talking about Big Ahha and what type of company we try to be everyday. I use it to talk about the way they should think about their site visitors, their customers, the business partners they work with and most importantly their employees.

I didn’t make up the “Don’t be evil” phrase. Many people know this as the motto espoused by the leaders at Google. But not many know where it came from. Here is an excerpt from the Don’t be evil - Wikipedia page.

Origin of the motto

According to John Battelle’s book on Google, The Search, the phrase “Don’t be evil” was not coined by Brin or Larry Page, but rather by Paul Buchheit, the engineer behind Gmail:

On July 19, 2001, about a dozen early employees met to mull over the founders’ directive [to elucidate Google’s core values] … The meeting soon became cluttered with the kind of easy and safe corporate clichés that everyone can support, but that carry little impact: Treat Everyone with Respect, for example, or Be on Time for Meetings.

The engineers in the room were rolling their eyes. [Amit] Patel recalls: “Some of us were very anticorporate, and we didn’t like the idea of all these specific rules. And engineers in general like efficiency — there had to be a way to say all these things in one statement, as opposed to being so specific.”

That’s when Paul Buchheit, another engineer in the group, blurted out what would become the most important three words in Google’s corporate history. “Paul said, ‘All of these things can be covered by just saying, Don’t Be Evil,’” Patel recalls. “And it just kind of stuck.”

… In the months after the meeting, Patel scribbled “Don’t Be Evil” in the corner of every whiteboard in the company… The message spread, and it was embraced, especially by Page and Brin… “I think it’s much better than Be Good or something,” Page jokes. “When you are making decisions, it causes you to think. I think that’s good.”

So when the going gets tough, when you are facing a hard decision or when you find your organization focusing on short term fixes remember… Don’t be evil. It never pays off in the end.