," he writes about the origin of the "Don't Be Evil" motto at Google. The phrase wasn't coined by Brin or Page, but instead by Paul Buchheit, the engineer behind Gmail.On July 19, 2001, about a dozen early employees met to mull over the founders' directive [to elucidate Google's core values] ... The meeting soon became cluttered with the kind of easy and safe corporate clichés that everyone can support, but that carry little impact: Treat Everyone with Respect, for example, or Be on Time for Meetings.
The engineers in the room were rolling their eyes. [Amit] Patel recalls: "Some of us were very anticorporate, and we didn't like the idea of all these specific rules. And engineers in general like efficiency -- there had to be a way to say all these things in one statement, as opposed to being so specific."
That's when Paul Buchheit, another engineer in the group, blurted out what would become the most important three words in Google's corporate history. "Paul said, 'All of these things can be covered by just saying, Don't Be Evil,'" Patel recalls. "And it just kind of stuck."
... In the months after the meeting, Patel scribbled "Don't Be Evil" in the corner of every whiteboard in the company... The message spread, and it was embraced, especially by Page and Brin... "I think it's much better than Be Good or something," Page jokes. "When you are making decisions, it causes you to think. I think that's good."
Battelle then editorializes that choosing such a clear and well understood framework for behavior may have been a mistake:
... What happens when those decisions have to do with whether or not to do business by the rules of the Chinese government, or whether to allow the U.S. government to track the search histories of thousands of Americans?
Defining evil seems pretty simple when you're sitting in a conference room of a small but growing Internet company in 2001. But had that small group of early employees understood the standard it was creating for Google through the adoption of that motto, it might have reconsidered its support for the phrase... when your business is understood to be a global arbiter of human knowledge and commerce, sticking to such a principled stand can become extremely ... tricky.
I would argue that for a company that intends to be the center of the world's information, it's far better to have an inconvenient slogan that employees internalize. "Don't Be Evil" makes rationalizing evil a little harder than an ambiguous set of social responsibility codes that give employees license to commit crimes against the conscience in the name of the corporation.