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Source: David Gelles for Financial Times
[posted on 02/26/2010]
Two days after last month's devastating earthquake in Haiti, Ed Lu, Google's programme manager for advanced projects, was fielding a rapid succession of phone calls over lunch. Mr Lu was liaising between Google and the US government as the Silicon Valley technology group tried to get updated satellite photos to first responders on the ground.
Not many Googlers could fill this critical role during a time of crisis. But Mr Lu's unusual CV made him ideally suited for the job. Before joining the company in 2007, Mr Lu was an astronaut at Nasa, where he commanded the International Space Station and the Space Shuttle. "I know a lot of people in the State Department and the Department of Defence," he says. "I'm trying to cut through the red tape."
Google employs more than 20,000 people, but Mr Lu is the only one to have travelled in space.
Still, hiring Mr Lu was not an obvious move for Google. The famously laid-back search company makes its money through advertising. And while Nasa, like Google, is a large organisation with a grand mandate and technically complex systems, Mr Lu had no experience of working for internet companies.
"It was a bit exploratory when I came on," he concedes. "I had a technical background, but I hadn't done any programming in 10 years. I was a dinosaur."
Yet such unconventional talent acquisitions are part of what makes some companies tick.
Kelly O. Kay, a San Francisco-based partner with recruiting firm Heidrick & Struggles, says businesses such as Google will make strategic hires when they find the right person. "Sometimes there's just such an interesting individual that a company decides to make a hire," he says. "And they'll do it without a formal job description or formal role. They're often hiring for jobs that don't exist."
Once Mr Lu joined Google, synergies emerged. He was an astrophysicist before joining Nasa, using telescopes to scan the stars, then organising massive reams of data.
This background proved relevant as he helped develop the camera used by Street View and the scanners used for Google Books, then work on data- gathering projects for Google Earth and Maps.
His signature project has been the development of Google Power Meter, an interface that lets homeowners monitor their energy usage. He came up with the idea while monitoring the petrol consumption of his Toyota Prius, and wondered why there wasn't a similar interface for his home. A better understanding of how electricity is being consumed should allow people to conserve energy, he says, thereby reducing electricity bills and carbon footprints.
Mr Lu presented the idea for Power Meter to Google chief executive Eric Schmidt as they shared a flight to Washington last year, where Mr Schmidt was giving a speech to honour Nasa's 50th anniversary. Mr Schmidt liked it, and gave Mr Lu a team to develop the project. Today utilities in the US, UK, Canada, Germany, and India are testing Power Meter.
For companies like Google, strategic hires of people with cross- disciplinary skills can prove invaluable. Though they don't fit into any particular role, they can enrich the company culture, and uncover new business opportunities.
"It's hard to replicate guys like this," says Mr Kay. "Companies hire these kinds of people because there's no one else in the world who has this combination of skills, stylistic fit with the company, and willingness to come on with this kind of ambiguity."
In spite of joining Google with no clear mandate, Mr Lu's impact has been felt across the organisation. And in launching Power Meter, he created a job that previously did not exist at the group.
He allows that life at the Googleplex is not as exciting as launching into space, but the former astronaut says his work has not changed all that much.
"The whole International Space Station is a giant engineering test facility," he says. "In some sense it is here, too. Google is a giant engineering development centre."
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