ComputerWorld has an interview a business analyst on the long-term nature of Google’s business. The company’s stated goal is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”, a goal which CEO Eric Schmidt was recently quoted as saying would take 300 years. In addition to talking long term, they have implemented some things which are encouragingly far-sighted.

A good example is their declining to split their stock, which is currently trading just slightly better than $475 per share. Splitting the stock 2 to 1, for example, would create twice as many shares each worth half as much. This is usually done to make the stock easier to buy. It’s hard to speculate why Google doesn’t do this, but it seems that the high price is intended to stop or discourage short-term investors - a play straight out of Warren Buffet’s playbook, the stock in whose company is currently hovering around $130,000 per share. In addition, they do not provide any guidance to investors regarding their expected quarterly performance, a small but important step to help investors look further than 3 months ahead.

The last long-term strategy I’ll mention is Google’s famous allotment of time for personal projects. This has lead directly to GMail, AdSense, Google News and several others. The company allows their engineers to spend 20% of their time working on whatever they want. This can let even the lowest level employee contribute to the company, and perhaps more importantly gives the employees an allotted time to daydream about the future of the company.

Tags: Business, Long Term Thinking