Office Life

I haven’t written much on the office or the team here in Gurgaon to date but I’m quite amazed by the way that Google has been able to replicate the office experience here halfway around the world. Though from the outside things look different, there are many reasons to feel at home in the office.
Decor is the standard Google colors against a white canvas of drywall. The lobby looks like most other Google lobbies, and the cafe reminds me of the Namaste station in Charlie’s cafe in Mountain View serving up curries, naan and veggies. The most important similarity has to be the kindness and intelligence of the people. I’ve immediately felt at home, hitting the gym with Abhijit after work, going to lunch with a crew of 8-12 and attending too many meetings. It’s very Googley. I’m excited about the 12 weeks ahead but I’m already feeling the time crunch. There is a lot I want to share with and learn from the teams here and such little time to do it all in. I’ve worked this week to start setting up a calendar for myself to manage the many projects I’d like to accomplish.
There is a large mental shift going on in the office right now whereby management is moving from a top down focus on productivity to a new focus on revenue & proactive relationship building as initiated by the team members themselves. Having been through such a transition in Mountain View, I think that I can offer significant perspective and guidance on what it means to be proactive and how to succeed with such ambiguously defined roles. The challenge is that in some ways, top down instruction is pervasive in Indian culture. I’ll share an example from the office. There is a series of bathroom stall newsletters put out in North America called “learning on the loo” or LOTL for short, where best practices on a multitude of subjects are shared with the broader team. One example from North America might be how to more effectively use Gmail labels to organize your inbox.
In the Gurgaon office, the first example I encountered of the local rendition of LOTL described “how to tell a story” including a 4 step process to set the scene, personify the characters, give the details and finally the conclusion. When I saw this, I thought that a 4 step process to spontaneity seemed a bit ironic but also in some ways documenting characteristics that I’ve found successful is almost certainly a method I’ll implore here. That being said, my hope is that by focusing on the reasoning behind the decisions I’ve made during the past 2 years as a Relationship Manager rather than just the decisions themselves, I’ll be able to equip the teams here to cope with similarly ambiguous tasks in the future and achieve great things for Google and themselves in the process.