Given Google’s ferocious appetite for growth, Coughran knew that GFS-once a groundbreaking innovation-would have to be replaced within a couple of years. His group was using Google File System (GFS) to store the massive amount of data required to support Google searches. By then it had already reinvented the way it handled web search and data storage multiple times. We had to create it.”Ĭoughran joined Google in 2003, just five years after its founding. “So when a problem happened, we couldn’t just go out and buy a solution. “We were doing work that no one else in the world was doing,” he says. His 1,000-person organization built Google’s “engine room,” the systems and equipment that allow us all to use Google and its many services 24/7.

Bill Coughran, as a senior vice president of engineering, led the group from 2003 to 2011. The company’s meteoric growth depended in large part on its ability to innovate and scale up its infrastructure at an unprecedented pace. But step inside its systems infrastructure group, and you quickly learn otherwise. Google’s astonishing success in its first decade now seems to have been almost inevitable. Bill Coughran, an SVP of engineering at Google, employed these capabilities both to solve the company’s near-term data storage needs and to make progress toward a next-generation solution. To be able, companies must generate ideas through discourse and debate experiment quickly, reflect, and adjust and make decisions that combine disparate and even opposing ideas. When Luca de Meo was Volkswagen’s head of marketing communication, he fostered a sense of purpose in his team by asking its members to reflect on what being part of VW meant to them strengthened their shared values by encouraging them to use the brand’s three components-innovation, responsibility, and value-to guide their work and built significant responsibility and autonomy into their rules of engagement. To be willing, the community must share a sense of purpose, values, and rules of engagement.

Becoming more deeply enmeshed in the group, Camille learns truths about the collective-and about herself-that she may not be able to survive.How can leaders build an organization that is capable of innovating continually over time? By creating a community that is both willing and able to innovate. Fueled by mutual rage, these women orchestrate their own brand of justice through precise, anonymous, complexly plotted and perfectly executed revenge killings, with individual members completing a specific and integral task in each plan.Īs Camille struggles to comprehend whether this is a role-playing exercise or terrifying reality, she must decide if these women are truly avenging angels or monsters.

When her rash actions attract the attention of a secret group of women-the collective-Camille is drawn into a dark web where these mothers share their wildly different stories of loss as well as their desire for justice in a world where privilege denies accountability and perpetrators emerge unscathed. Just how far will a grieving mother go to right a tragic wrong?Ĭamille Gardner is a grieving-and angry-mother who, five years after her daughter’s death, is still obsessed with the privileged young man she believes to be responsible. The USA Today bestselling and Edgar Award–winning author of Never Look Back and If I Die Tonight plumbs the dark side of justice and the depths of diabolical revenge in this propulsive novel of psychological suspense that melds the driving narrative of Then She Was Gone with the breathtaking twists of The Chain and the violent fury of Kill Bill.

Booku collective