Google Goes Globe-Trotting

Doing their best to ignore typhoon Man-Yi, the Googlers take a walking tour of Tokyo's Harajuku district (apparently their brainiac status does not extend to the concept of getting out of the rain). Jini Kim, 26, is stressed. In four days she has a huge presentation that she'll make via Internet to several Google board members. So while helping to manage the activities in Tokyo, she is working deep into the night. The only APM who didn't study computer science—she studied political science and classics at Berkeley—she turned down prestigious scholarships to take the Google job.

Kim was assigned to a still-under-wraps service called Google Health, and had an idea to spin off her own project, a step requiring approval from one of Google's top executives. She targeted Larry Page. But since Page and cofounder Sergey Brin had jettisoned their assistants last year, arranging time with him was a challenge. By charting Page's movements she successfully waylaid him one day and got the go-ahead for her project. "I'm getting really good at stalking," she says.

This sort of enterprise was exactly what Google was hoping for when it began the APM program five years ago. Earlier attempts to hire veterans from firms like Microsoft had awful results. "Google is so different that it was almost impossible to reprogram them into this culture," says CEO Eric Schmidt. The difficulties led Google VP Mayer (employee No. 20) to wonder whether experience was way overrated. The earliest Google employees were distinguished by an abundance of brain cells as opposed to a fat r?sum? or a stint at McKinsey. Why not replicate the phenomenon?

APM No. 1, hired July 2002, was newly minted Stanford grad Brian Rakowski. "You're going to be responsible for Gmail," Mayer told him, explaining that he was to launch a product designed for tens of millions of users. "I was 22 years old, and shocked that they were going to let someone that young and inexperienced do that job," says Rakowski, who is still working at Google. He succeeded by a combination of technical acumen (necessary so the engineers, Google's true royalty, wouldn't write him off as a bozo) and the good sense to lead with wit and enthusiasm.

Now Google has marked its hundredth APM hire. "These are smart people, at the top of their class, but also who have done something entrepreneurial—editor of the yearbook, or started a company," says Jeff Ferguson, the recruiter for the APM program. "I can tell within five minutes if someone is right for this," he says.

In each city, the APMs visit the local office—here in Tokyo, located in hip Shibuya. They share the product "road map" for the next year with the local employees, answer questions and then hear what the engineers and managers in each location are focusing on. They also get a sense of the marketplace in each country by talking to local Googlers, customers and partners. In Tokyo, they learn that Yahoo Japan is clobbering the competition—"It's like Google and AOL and eBay rolled into one," says one manager. But Google has captured the imagination of the Japanese people—it's the No. 2 brand in the country, behind Toyota.