Google s chief financial officer, Patrick Pichette, announced Tuesday that he is retiring.
Here s a look back at some of the cost discipline that he became known for when he arrived at Mountain View in 2008, most of which can be found in New Yorker writer Ken Auletta s book Googled: The End of the World as We Know It.
1. Cafeteria austerity. Pichette found out a third of Google s free gourmet food was wasted, so he cut back hours and menus. We still have free food, Pichette said at the time. We still have massages. There is still a doctor on site.
2. No more bottled water. He was apparently involved in the debate over whether to keep offering water in plastic bottles. Google eventually shifted to the cheaper, and greener, practice of serving filtered water.
3. Business reviews. He is particularly good at business reviews, so we ve been going through systematically business after business, then-CEO Eric Schmidt said in 2009. Google ended up dropping some sites, such as Lively, and began inserting ads on Google News and elsewhere.
4. Crowdsourcing cuts. He launched an internal website for Googlers to suggest ways to cut waste.
5. Scaling back on staff. For the first and possibly only time during Google s spectacular two-decade growth, the company made some significant jobs cuts and hiring freezes during Pichette s early tenure.
The context of these cutbacks was the recession, which Google, of course, managed to survive. Here s how Auletta described Pichette s arrival:
Pichette had come over from Canada s foremost telephone company, Bell Canada, where he was credited with slashing two billion dollars from its operating costs. A thin man of modest height, he comes to work lugging a backpack and wearing jeans, a button-down shirt with sleeves rolled up and a ready smile. Told that he has come to Google at a bad time, he quickly disagrees. You can argue I came at a good time, he said. When everything runs well and perfectly, at least according to financial results, you don t take the time to ask tougher questions because you don t have to. When you re growing so fast that you re running out of desks, if you talked to people about waste and inefficiencies they wouldn t have listened to you. It would have been the wrong question to ask at that time.
Above: Patrick Pichette (Photo courtesy Google)
