"How can we help" is what Ben King, the IT behemoth's Singapore operations head, has been focused on since the outbreak of the global pandemic.
FOR Ben King, Google's Singapore Country Director, it's been a baptism by fire. Soon after his appointment in September last year, Mr King, who has served in different roles for Google in Asia, began working with the country leadership team on his vision for the tech giant's operations in Singapore. The final mission statement reads: Empower Singaporeans today, for tomorrow.
Google plans to do this through a combined strategy of its own growth and investment, skills training and by boosting productivity, says Mr King.
Crafted in late 2019, the mission statement was well received. Then early this year, the Covid-19 pandemic hit Singapore and the rest of the world, putting everything out of spin.
"You know, it took us a couple of weeks to actually figure out how serious this might be, and I remember walking downstairs to see my boss and saying, 'Hey, look, I think this is going to be very, very severe'," Mr King recalls, speaking to The Business Times over (but of course) Google Meet in April.
The young Google leader - he's 37 - is brutally honest about his feelings during the initial days of the pandemic. "I was trying to figure out what it means as we suddenly found ourselves in a difficult time. I've never experienced anything quite like this in my lifetime, and I don't think many of us have."
Mr King's initial bewilderment is understandable. As he notes, nearly half the world's population has been under some sort of mobility restriction, global economies are effectively shut down and not many people have a clear understanding of the ramifications of all this going forward.
And this was clearly an early challenge for Mr King's leadership skills. Being an avid cricket player - till recently he used to bat at the vital No 3 positon for the Singapore Cricket Club team - he turned to the life lessons learnt while playing the great game, first in his native Australia and later in Singapore. Team building and working with others while keeping calm is some of the things you learn from sports like cricket, says Mr King.
"My first reaction, after realising that things were not normal, was to ensure that Googlers and the people I was responsible for felt safe and cared for while also trying to figure out what was happening in the client community," he says.
Ultimately, Mr King and his team in Singapore came to the conclusion that the vision statement remains incredibly relevant even in the changed scenario. The whole empowerment of Singaporeans, today for tomorrow, is actually reinforced through the current crisis and "we realise that all we need is some pivots to make it into a viable strategy going forward", he says.
"Our mission statement kind of cut across three big areas; one is investment into the country, whether it be via job creation or infrastructure building such as data centres. Secondly, it is about increasing productivity and lastly it is about informing the public and our users through our core products."
When it comes to creating jobs and investment in infrastructure the goal remains remarkably consistent, says Mr King.
"As far as skills training are concerned, we have doubled down on it while working with government agencies. We have taken a lot of guidance from the EDB (Economic Development Board), Singapore Tourism Board, ESG (Enterprise Singapore) and various industry associations to figure out where we can have the highest levels of impact."
Google has revised the format of its SME Leadership Academy programme by pivoting it online. The amended programme - targeted towards the retail, tourism and food and beverage sectors - is expected to reach out to 4,000 SME business leaders by the end of 2021, says Mr King. Last year, the programme catered to 340 business leaders.
"The second piece within the skilling initiative that we've launched is Grow with Google, just before the circuit breaker measures. This brings together a number of our programmes that are relevant to the local community, small business owners, educators, job seekers, students, developers, and others. It is now live and we're excited to have that up and running," he says.
Google is also helping to cultivate the developer community and this will become even more important over the next couple of years, Mr King says, adding: "We outreached to 13,000 developers last year and that's because of the vast opportunity that is associated with developer talent in the country.
"Nielsen ran a study in 2018 which suggests that if Singapore harnesses developer skill sets well, it will result in a US$1.6 billion windfall for the economy. I truly believe that this opportunity will only become more enhanced as we move forward now in the current environment."
However, he also notes that the same study suggests that seven out of 10 businesses struggle to find developer talent, or to hire in a meaningful way. "So, we are investing into this side of the skilling and cultivation of talent quite a bit. And we're trying to move a lot of our programmes over into the digital space within our developer relations initiatives as well," he adds.
Helping health officials
As part of its response to Covid-19, Google has been trying to help public health officials as much as possible. "There's a bunch of different things that we're doing. Globally we are helping with contact tracing and then also in planning social distancing measures," says Mr King.
In Singapore, the company is enabling fast builds of apps that are helping frontline workers with tasks like personal temperature data collection and also contact tracing.
"These are tools to ensure that people have the most cutting-edge technology in their hands to help fight the spread of the disease," he points out.
Globally, Google has a joint collaboration with Apple to create a Bluetooth-based contact tracing system that helps governments and health agencies in the battle to contain Covid-19. "It's a comprehensive solution that includes APIs (application programming interfaces) and system-level technology to assist in tracing, while keeping the privacy and security central to the design," Mr King says.
The Google executive notes that, as part of its global efforts, the company's CEO, Sundar Pichai, has announced US$800 million in investment in Covid-19 related reliefs, out of which US$340 million is geared towards small businesses in the form of advertisement credits.
"Those businesses would need to have been live with the Google ad platform for over a year and they would need to spend these advertisement credits within 2020 and ideally they will help them stay in touch with their customers during what is a pretty difficult time," says Mr King.
Google is also doing "a bunch of different things" to make sure that people have the right information at the right time during this crisis, he adds.
"Obviously, misinformation can be incredibly dangerous, so just making sure people have authoritative, credible information when they're looking for it is incredibly important to us. From a search point of view, we have a Covid-19 knowledge panel that connects users to the latest news, safety tips, and links to authoritative news sources, like MOH (Ministry of Health), WHO (World Health Organization) and also to authoritative news sources," he says.
Mr King adds that this has been done in an easily navigable way and by ensuring the information is easily digestible. "So the three big things that we're doing both in Singapore and globally are: helping public officials, helping businesses, and trying to be as helpful as possible at a time when many are struggling."
Importance of Asia-Pacific
Looking to the future, Mr King cites the importance of the Asia-Pacific market and how Singapore is the pivot for Google in the region.
"There was a time when we were just a Silicon Valley-based company exporting out to the rest of the world. That's changed dramatically over the years to a point now where Asia-Pacific has something in the vicinity of half of the world's digital population, nearly two billion.
"The numbers are incredibly impressive, just purely from a user-ship standpoint. But then if you think about things like apps usage, e-Commerce usage and mobile subscriptions then you understand that Asia-Pacific really is a standout No1 in all of these different aspects."
It is for this reason that Google looks at Asia- Pacific in a really focused way, and as a result has been investing pretty heavily into its regional headquarters in Singapore.
"We started with a small office with around 24 people in 2007. Since then we have grown very fast and today we have around 2,000 people working in our offices in Mapletree Business City with a lot of engineering work being done here," says Mr King.
The conversation veers back to the Covid-19 response, particularly the need to combat the dissemination of fake news in these perilous times.
"We are trying to ensure the surfacing of authentic information as it is absolutely fundamental to our vision as a company in terms of getting the right information into people's hands. We are combating misinformation but I don't think it's the job for just one company. It has to be a joint collaboration between technology companies, civil society, and journalists.
"We've blocked millions of advertisements that attempt to profit from the situation. On our Google Play store for Android users, we have prohibited developers from capitalising on sensitive events like Covid-19," he points out.
Data privacy, Mr King declares, is an "incredibly important issue" for the company. "Our success as a company depends on how we serve our users and if we serve them right then all else will follow. And for that we need to get privacy and security issues right - and by the way, the two issues are not entirely the same thing.
"It's probably worthwhile to take a step back and think about why data is important and what positive benefits data can bring. You know, if I think about why we utilise data, it's really about making sure that the user experience is more relevant, more tailored, more useful for anyone who's actually coming onto our platform.
"Just to give a small example: If you share your location data, maps will be more useful to you. You'll be able to get access to information that is relevant for you in your given moment. It can also help us make maps more useful to everybody else by aggregating, in a non-PII (personally identifiable information) way, information such that we can give estimated traffic times, journey times, these sorts of things. So data help to provide better experience to our users," says Mr King.
Putting safeguards in place
He agrees that related to all this is the need to ensure that the right safeguards are in place across Google's various platforms. "We have community guidelines for all of our platforms as it relates to content. While that is important, digital literacy is also an issue we need to consider very carefully. I've been in various different roles within Google and have exposure to different markets and digital literacy does change by market.
"In Thailand as an example, digital literacy is really important because you have communities coming online for the very first time who have had no effective experience with the Internet. Indonesia and Vietnam also have similar challenges with adults and children coming online for the first time and we have to help them to understand the basics of keeping safe online," says Mr King.
"In Singapore things are a bit different as it is one of the most connected nations in the world and has been so for some time. So our focus here is on children and school-going kids who are going online for the first time.
"The Online Safety Park, a project that tackles some concerns of parents and teachers about digital literacy and habits among young children, is a perfect example of things that we are doing to make education around online security, fun and enjoyable for students because we see this as being the pocket of the population that we need to really focus on the most in Singapore."
He adds that Google also engages with regulators to make sure that they have the most up-to-date information on best practices, not least around cybersecurity. "So in Singapore, it's really about students and kids, and about engaging with the regulators and making sure that we're helping as best as we can," he says.
Working from home and maintaining safe distancing norms, the sports-loving Mr King keeps himself busy by spending time with his family and reading biographies of sporting personalities whom he admires. One of his icons: Steve Waugh, the legendary Australian cricketer, known for his calmness on the field and the ability to inspire his teammates to excel and become world beaters.
When he was younger, Mr King used to dream of following in his icon's footsteps on the field. That didn't happen, but he's happy to now pick up tips on leadership skills from his all-time favourite batsman, especially in these extraordinary trying times.
© 2020 Singapore Press Holdings
This article was written by Amit Roy Choudhury from The Singapore Business Times and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@newscred.com.
