Marissa Mayer is Google's vice president for Search Products & User Experience. She leads the company's product management efforts on search products—Web search, images, news, books, products, maps, Google Earth, Google Toolbar, Google Desktop, Google Health, Google Labs, and more. She joined Google in 1999 as Google's first female engineer and led the user interface and Web server teams at that time. Her efforts have included designing and developing Google's search interface, internationalizing the site to more than 100 languages, defining Google News, and Orkut, and launching more than 100 features and products on Google.com. Several patents have been filed on her work in artificial intelligence and interface design. She has been involved in virtually every aspect of the development of Google's Web pages, from the layout of the site to new software that allows users to search their computers' hard drives. The company's mission to “organize the world's information” is no small feat and has led to such initiatives as digitizing the world's libraries, offering free voice calls, providing satellite images of the world, and giving away wireless broadband service. Google's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin encourage idea generation at all levels of the organization. Facilitating this process is an ideas mailing list that is open to anyone in the company and allows people to post idea proposals. Part of Mayer's role is to sort through the list and promote the good ideas for additional scrutiny from upper management. With the company's revenues nearing $24 billion and nearly 19,000 employees worldwide, her job is becoming increasingly complicated. As the idea gatekeeper, it is easy to imagine animosity developing between Mayer and those employees who have had their ideas dismissed. Insiders cite Mayer's ability to effectively communicate with both the MBAs and the PhDs as being critical to her ability to manage the idea flow. Determining when pet projects are ready to be promoted to the top is a process that Mayer conducts through an established process, which includes discussing ideas during open office hours and brainstorming sessions; however, it is Mayer's willingness to put protocol aside in order to speak with programmers informally that ensures that ideas are brought to light. One example of her affable nature leading to innovation is evident in the development of Google's popular desktop search. In 2003, during a casual chat with a worker, Mayer learned about a project being worked on by an Australian engineer, Steve Lawrence. He was developing software that would allow him to search the contents of his computer, which was running on the Linux operating system. Mayer contacted Lawrence, got him to commit to developing a version of the software that could run on any PC, and then provided a team to assist him. The end result was that the desktop search was brought to market in October 2004, beating Microsoft by two months. Typically Mayer is exposed to ideas through her three-times a week office hours. Groups get about five minutes to make their case. The goal is to gain Mayer's approval so that a proposed idea can be taken forward. Some ideas that have recently come across her desk are to provide the Google site in additional languages, to provide a link from the Google homepage to the site for Hurricane Katrina victims, and to offer new software that would get Google closer to providing personalized search engines, which track users' preferences and then provide tailored information to improve results. Of the three, the only idea that made it through her rigorous screening process was the personalized search engine. After questioning the proposed product name and pressing the team on the product's features, Mayer approved the project for Larry Page's review. In order to keep her idea review process as efficient as possible, Mayer has to remain objective when it comes to evaluating the procedures that she has set in place. For instance, Mayer maintained Google's Top 100 priorities list for years in order to rank projects based on their level of importance. In its inception, the list was effective in allowing Mayer to keep track and prioritize Google's various initiatives; however, as the company grew, the list grew with it, eventually reaching 270 projects. Realizing that the list had run its course, Google's execs retired it. Given the breakneck speed of innovation, Mayer must not only keep ideas from inundating the company but she must also ensure that she does not become the bottleneck preventing commercially viable ideas from getting to market. From an outsider's perspective, Mayer at times appears to be the matriarch of Google, keeping all of the employees in line. In some respects, Mayer is responsible for keeping the “family” happy. Google's culture of “geek machismo,” which regularly leads to intellectual sparring, can get out of control. Mayer's job is to keep the company on course while maintaining the company's culture of fearlessness. No wonder she was selected the youngest woman ever to be included on Fortune's Most Powerful Women list. Her ability to remain accessible to Google's employees and their ideas will be vital to the company beating its competitors in the future.
Relate the definition of a “corporate entrepreneurial strategy” to the role that Marissa Mayer must fulfill at Google?