I beleive G is 'well run' if you think of them as a 'whole' - even if it means 'poorly run' in many ways. Search and AdWords are probably 'well run' by whateve

I beleive G is 'well run' if you think of them as a 'whole' - even if it means 'poorly run' in many ways. Search and AdWords are probably 'well run' by whatever measure. And they make money with radical surplus, kind of like pumping sweet Oil cheaply. And like such places that have cheap oil, a lot of other things are dysfunctional. We can look past some failures like 'Wave' as merely taking risk, which is fine. But strategic disasters like 'Google Plus' show an inability to do something coherently across business units. YouTube, in many ways, has a really, really poor interface and some really bad and slow-moving features. But hey, it makes money. I worked at a major handset maker that made money hand-over fist on devices, and it was laughable how dysfunctional some things were. This is normal. OKRs are probably a minor contribution to G's success, and maybe they help confirm G's unique 'culture' as much as anything, in that it's powerful to be able to say 'this is how we do things here', it's like a kind of 'internal branding'.