The lesson from Google Doodles

In other words, to go beyond whey you have gone beyond

Google is among the most innovative firms ever and it has always been like this since its birth in 1999. We tend to not consider this peculiarity anymore today, as it has become a tool we use every day and it would sound odd to stop for a while thinking how much innovation counted throughout the history of this company.
I do not want to talk about why Google is such an innovative company, everyone knows about it. It is important to see how it carries on being this way. I do not want to talk about what they offer as a service, everyone knows about it. It is important to understand through what it spreads its new ideas. In other words, I want to talk about its logo and the lesson it teaches us.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin always consider the logo of their company as one of the most important features. As a matter of fact, it is not a casa that the home page of the website is composed by the logo itself on a white background.
Google logo was created by an Israeli woman, Ruth Kedar, and throughout years it has become the logo we see now. Born from the pencil of a single woman, it has become always more important and a team was created just to manage it and it is the demonstration of its importance inside the company.
I think that the Google logo show how it is important to not stop, even when you made something great. As I said before, everything was utterly innovative in Google since the beginning, so the logo as well has always been seen like a tool that can create value just like what happens in the biggest companies in the world. Page and Brin did not stop there, they did not think that it was enough, they did not think that nothing else could be done on the logo. They tried to create something very innovative, something that it was not there before. And they did it. They created Doodles.

Doodle is the alteration of the traditional logo in order to celebrate special occasions, anniversaries and events. It could seem something simply to us, but it is just because we are now used to see it. Google team understood that the logo could be improved once again in order to make customers closer and closer to the core ideas of the company, enhancing in this way the value of the brand. It is not surprising that the inventor of Doodles, Dennis Hwang, created a department which works in order to ideate and produce new Doodles. Its logo is this became a tool to be managed as something very concrete and tangible. Hwang himself understood the real power and aim of Doodles.

“One of the things I like best about Google is that we’re the kind of company that, when a user writes in to suggest that we honor the once-every-122-years Transit of Venus on our home page, we actually do it” (Dennis Hwang)

The result, as we can see almost every day, is stunning. Some of the Doodles created, such as the ones dedicated to John Lennon, Keith Haring and the Olympics, has become cult.
Doodles are now so important that they often are created ad hoc for single courtiers, in order to get once again closer to the customers, to make them think that Google cares about their history and they tradition. This is a necessary tool to make the power and the image of a certain company, and therefore its results, bigger and bigger
Google has been so innovative that they managed to create value from something that for a lot of people could not create value and for the majority was already complete and not object of an improvement any more.

This little part in the huge history of Google, tells how much is important to go beyond, always. It does not matter if you have already made great things, it is not time to stop yet. It is not time to stare behind looking at we have done before and to think that it is enough, innovation never ends. It is necessary to go beyond even when you have just gone beyond.
This can be done with an attitude which makes people curious.

“Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect” (Samiel Johnson)

It happens sometimes that one feels satisfied after having achieved a great results. It must be this way, one must feel glad and satisfied. It must not feel full, sated. When you finish something it is the right moment to start something else. Even if you are already beyond.