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A Look at Google: Billion-dollar Social Entrepreneurship?
We aspire to make Google an institution that makes the world a better place.
--Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google founders
According to the company’s Web site, the name Google is based on the mathematical term googol, which refers to the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. For most of us, a number that large is difficult to comprehend.
Perhaps equally difficult is the concept of a multi-billion dollar company seemingly intent on doing good in the world. Is it possible that Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, are social entrepreneurs?
The knee-jerk reaction is no. After all, social entrepreneurship is not about initial public offerings and wealthy shareholders. Or is it?
Making the World a Better Place
Whether you characterize social entrepreneurs by their commitment to a double bottom line (financial and social), whether you describe them in terms of their ability to transform society and execute on revolutionary ideas, or whether you go to the dictionary to learn an entrepreneur organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise, the definition could apply to Google. Certainly none of the definitions precludes initial public offerings (IPOs) or shareholder wealth. In fact, one might argue that to take a company public should be an ideal of social entrepreneurship--put financial ownership of the driving idea into the hands of the public, the citizens.
Included as part of the documentation Google filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission earlier this year is a “Letter from the Founders: ‘An Owner’s Manual’ for Google Shareholders,” in which Page and Brin express their social vision for the company:
We aspire to make Google an institution that makes the world a better place. With our products, Google connects people and information all around the world for free. We are adding other powerful services such as Gmail that provides an efficient one gigabyte Gmail account for free. By releasing services for free, we hope to help bridge the digital divide. AdWords connects users and advertisers efficiently, helping both. AdSense helps fund a huge variety of online web sites and enables authors who could not otherwise publish. Last year we created Google Grants--a growing program in which hundreds of non-profits addressing issues, including the environment, poverty and human rights, receive free advertising. And now, we are in the process of establishing the Google Foundation. We intend to contribute significant resources to the foundation, including employee time and approximately 1% of Google’s equity and profits in some form. We hope someday this institution may eclipse Google itself in terms of overall world impact by ambitiously applying innovation and significant resources to the largest of the world’s problems.1
Daniel Rabuzzi, CEO and president of the Leader to Leader Institute (http://www.leadertoleader.org/), notes, “On the one hand, the use of profits in a foundation is good (but hardly innovative). So is the desire to bridge the digital divide. On the other hand, touting Gmail is disingenuous, as the recent [privacy] controversy surrounding the service suggests.”
Rabuzzi’s essential point is that marketing copy isn’t enough. An organization has to deliver on the promise. “Coca-Cola once had a wildly successful advertising campaign that sounds just like the Google aspiration: ‘I'd like to make the world a better place.’ That alone does not make Coca-Cola a social enterprise.”
The Role of Sectors
What is it that makes looking at Page and Brin as social entrepreneurs seem a little outrageous? Maybe we’re sectorists. Maybe we as a society think that for-profit enterprises are about making money, and nonprofits are about doing good, and never shall the twain meet.
But here Google is, challenging that idea. As are others.
In March of this year, the Omidyar Foundation, established by Pam and Pierre Omidyar (Pierre Omidyar was the founder of eBay), announced intentions to expand investments in social change beyond the nonprofit sector, into multiple sectors--nonprofit, for-profit, and public policy--under the new name the Omidyar Network Fund but continuing to operate as a 501(c)(3).
For Omidyar, potential for effecting social change isn’t the purview of nonprofits alone. “We have also realized that social change requires cross-sectoral approaches to realize its fullest potential,” he writes.2
David Bornstein, author of How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, realizes that sectors are artificial boundaries, not real divisions. “The whole idea of dividing society into a bunch of sectors is just a framework to try to simplify things we have to talk about. It’s not definitive; there are no cut boundaries between the sectors,” he says. “These are just language tools that are necessary if we want to have a conversation, but ultimately, in the end, if you really parse them to the deepest points, these distinctions dissolve.”3
But Isn’t This Just Corporate Social Responsibility?
Yes and no. Using the “define:” function in Google itself, you may come up with something like the following for corporate social responsibility, or CSR: "Corporate social responsibility is concerned with treating the stakeholders of the firm ethically or in a socially responsible manner. Stakeholders exist both within a firm and outside. Consequently, behaving socially responsibly will increase the human development of stakeholders both within and outside the corporation."4
According to this and most other commonly accepted definitions, CSR is a by-product of a corporation’s pursuit of profit--philanthropic giving, for instance--or a characteristic of how the company pursues profits--conducting business in an ethical manner that does not lead to environmental degradation or violation of human rights, for example. Google certainly fits within such definitions.
On the other hand, to say that the very thing that earns the corporation’s profits is in itself a social good pushes the borders of typical definitions of CSR to where they overlap with notions of social entrepreneurship. Google’s Page and Brin position the company this way in their rhetoric. Of course, saying and doing, as always, are two very different things, but if Google does half of what it says it will, we should all--to borrow language from one of Google’s famous search tools--feel lucky.
1 See http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312504073639/ds1.htm
#toc16167_1.
2 From http://www.omidyar.org/.
3 Be sure to read this Sophist’s “How to Change the World: Can Social Entrepreneurship Be Taught?,” based on an interview with David Bornstein.
4 From A Planetary Bargain: Corporate Social Responsibility Comes of Age (Macmillan, UK, 1998) by Michael Hopkins. See http://www.mhcinternational.com/glossary.
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