Heard the one about the chef that shaped company culture?

How much value does your organization put on the quality of on-site amenities offered to employees? What about the value of the canteen?

One of the many stand-out chapters in The Google Story – a quite amazing book given to me as a farewell pressie from the Melcrum folks before I relocated to Australia – is about Charlie Ayers, the Executive Chef hired by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin to provide wholesome and free food to Google employees when the company was a mere 45 hires old.

In his five-year tenure, Ayers was given carte blanche to provide the best food possible for Google staff, eliminating the hassle and cost of venturing outside the office at lunchtime and improving productivity by producing great food that kept everyone happy and metabolising fast, thus keeping the Googlers bouncing along throughout the day. Ayers also produced parties once a month on Fridays with entertainment and to celebrate the company’s astonishing, revolutionary IPO, ditched the traditional champagne party for a one-day special Ben & Jerry’s ice cream bar.

Ayers also organised special menus for birthdays and often didn’t publish the lunch menu till 10 minutes before service just to keep people guessing. As Google grew, Ayers was able to hire more and more chefs to keep pace, and was so highly valued and grew so famous in Silicon Valley that people were throwing offers at him to open restaurants.

“So what?” I hear you ask. Well here’s the crux. When introducing Ayers to a certain Robin Williams, who was visiting the Googleplex on the afternoon of Ayers’s leaving party, Google CEO Eric Schmidt pointed out that, “Charlie created the culture here.”

Charlie, the chef, played a major role in creating the culture at what’s widely perceived to be the hottest job ticket in the hottest industry in the world.

It’s clear that the scooter riding, roller blading, Segway loving Brin and Page themselves laid the foundations for the wacky kingdom that is Google HQ (Ayers himself is quoted in the book saying the wave of energy at Google fed his own imagination and work ethic), but who’d have thunk the free food and end of week wind-down sessions would play such a recognised, pivotal role in making somewhere a great place to work?

Alex Manchester

P.S. There's a good summary of some of the key points in The Google Story here. I expect I'll have some more thoughts on it as time goes on.