Google's Eric Schmidt - Growing Google and Google Culture

Google's revenue and employee head count have tripled in the last two years. How do you keep from becoming too bureaucratic or too chaotic?

It's a constant problem. We analyze this every day, and our conclusion is that the best model is still small teams running as fast as they can and tolerating a certain lack of cohesion. Attempting to provide too much order dries out the creativity. What's needed in a properly functioning corporation is a balance between creativity and order.

But we've reined in certain things. For example, we don't tolerate the kind of "Hey, I want to have my own database and have a good time" behavior that was effective for us in the past.

-- Wired, May 2007.