IE- For those of you who don't know the basic premise, Google reportedly allow (or allowed) their employees to spend 20% of their time working on projects for Google that may or may not be outside their traditional role. It has been credited for the creation of Gmail and Adsense, whilst becoming possibly the best known innovation program in the world.
However, all may not be as it seems with the 20%.
There are a number of questions about it that are yet to really be answered, but key amongst them is whether it ever actually existed. This stems from a number of different sources, but primarily from Marissa Mayer, the 20th Google employee who became the CEO of Yahoo!, who responded to a question from a Yahoo! employee about the idea that 'It’s funny. People have been asking me since I got here, ‘When is Yahoo going to have 20% time?’ I’ve got to tell you the dirty little secret of Google’s 20% time. It’s really 120%,'. She then went on to say that rather than the 20% being the time you spend on a project instead of working on your duties, it's simply something that people do in addition to their primary tasks. Read more
