they listen to Calif. First Lady Maria... ( Paul Sakuma )
This is what a speech by Maria Shriver on "work-life balance" to employees at Google headquarters Tuesday looked like:
Shriver sits casually in a director's chair up front, talking about the challenges of being California's first lady, a mother of four, a stand-in for Oprah and Larry King and an advocate for numerous causes.
A sea of open laptops balances on the knees of multi-tasking Google employees who fill the crowded assembly room. Engineer Brian Schneirow flips his open, googles Maria Shriver and hits enter.
More than a dozen images of her pop up: on a magazine cover, at her wedding with Arnold, in a bathing suit with her shirtless husband from his body-building years.
Shriver, in a white linen suit, talks about her three teenagers and 9-year-old and how she thinks maternity leave for parents during the teen years isn't such a bad idea.
Schneirow, in a black Google sweatshirt, scrolls down to a photo of the whole Schwarzenegger family, smiling at a Hollywood movie premiere.
Shriver mentions one of her five books, "Ten Things I Wish I'd Known Before I Went Out into the Real World."
Schneirow does a quick search and scans Amazon.com's book review.
Just what the rest of the Googlers were doing during the mid-afternoon speech with their laptop screens flickering is hard to say. Checking e-mail? Designing a new technology to revolutionize the world? Who knows.
But Schneirow, a 33-year-old engineering manager and UCLA graduate, said he just wanted a little Shriver background. What's so surprising about a real-time Google search? "It's pretty well integrated into daily life," he said matter-of-factly. Which gets us back to the work-life balance. Shriver says it's impossible to achieve. "I have to write a book - write five books - pop out four children, it's a blur," Shriver said. Schneirow says he thinks Google does a "great job of encouraging work-life balance." Indeed. At the Mountain View campus, open around the clock to receive those calls from its global offices, employees get all their meals free: breakfast, lunch and dinner from their choice of Italian, Mexican, Asian and Indian in the food court. Nothing like a late-afternoon strawberry mojito colada from the smoothie bar. Fitness is encouraged, from the colorful company bicycles to ride from one end of campus to the other, to the several gyms, each with trainers in blue T-shirts. A life-guard is on duty at the two eternal-current pools and the massage rooms are always good for a quick nap. It's all there to create "an environment that encourages collaboration and the easy exchange of ideas," said Google spokeswoman Sunny Gettinger. For a while during Shriver's speech, Schneirow closed his laptop and just listened. Follow your passion, she told them, but "slow down." This advice comes, she said, "after operating my life at a thousand miles an hour." She's now trying to live her life in the present. "What I'm trying to do," she said, "is not do a lot of stuff like this." But Schneirow didn't hear that part. He had to cut out early for a meeting.
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