TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Google is trying to insure that as the company grows, it stays innovative:

To stop that happening, Google has begun to hold regular meetings at which employees are encouraged to present new ideas to Eric Schmidt, the firm’s chief executive, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin, its co-founders.

Layers of managers between upper management and employees, coupled with a formalized chain of command for how new ideas must flow through those layers, leads to little idea flow. The company ends up doing just what management wants to do, rather than taking advantage of something even more important: their employees’ insight and ideas.

That’s what big organizations do to cope with so many workers and different businesses. In good startups, though, there are no chains of command and layers of management — there is “upper” management and the workers, which often overlap. Idea flow is informal; if you have an idea, you tell the owner when you bump into them on the way to the bathroom or while getting a beer after work.

So that’s what Google is trying to emulate. It’s a smart thing to do.

Most interesting, though, is how the Wave project was managed. Lars Rasmussen was given authority to hire the people he wanted on the project, to base it away from Google headquarters, and to keep it secret from others in the company. Effectively, it sounds like he was given permission to create a group which operated much like a startup does. By doing so, the project was kept small and focused — others were not able to nit-pick the project while it was developing. Rasmussen’s group, because it was small and given independence, could hone in on their vision of what the product should be. This helps insure a product maintains its integrity.