For security chief, Google clicked with SEAL
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — As corporate America recruits veterans who have led men and women under fire, Google has skimmed the cream of the crop to manage its global security.
Veteran Chris Rackow heads the team that protects the company’s 80,000 employees, its offices and property, in more than 150 cities across almost 60 countries.
Google tapped Rackow’s experience just over a year ago, recognizing the value the former warrior would bring to the search powerhouse.
He had spent years in two of the most elite military and paramilitary organizations in the world — the U.S. Navy SEALs and the FBI Hostage Rescue Team.
Rackow’s leadership illustrates how corporate America has caught on to the resource created by veterans of U.S. foreign interventions. An ability to manage complex, risky and dynamic problems, especially in the rapidly changing technology industry, carries a premium. Google brought Rackow on board in September 2016 as vice president of global security.
He is one of many veterans at Google, which does not disclose the number it hires, but says they’re employed in every job category, including software engineering, sales, finance and security.
“One of the highest values of veterans is leadership just because it is such a core element within the military, from junior-enlisted all the way up to senior officers,” Rackow said.
“Everybody’s expected to exert some type of leadership, and that is baked into recruits from day one all the way through.”
“It’s a quality that I have seen to be slackening across the business world,” Rackow said. “That’s, I think, where veterans really can play a huge part — coming in and providing positive, respectful and dignified leadership for organizations, especially multinationals.”
Rackow’s military career started in 1988 when he joined the SEALs, a Navy special forces unit known for its punishing selection program and high-stakes covert missions. He was a SEAL for nearly 23 years.
He also spent 13 years in the FBI, for five years as a member of the Hostage Rescue Team, a counterterrorism unit operating at home and abroad, and, like the SEALs, famed for its harsh induction and commando-style operations.
Now he works in an industry where the weapons of battle are code and silicon chips.
“I know I’m not the smartest guy in the room,” Rackow said. “In fact, I’m probably at the very low end of the totem pole based on the amazing skills we have here at Google.”
And for veterans, the corporate world has some significant differences from the armed services.
“The government and the military really are quite homogeneous. It really is not as truly diverse as a company is, and especially a global company,” he said.
“You really are presented with 360 degrees of various belief systems and ideas and concepts. That’s probably just the unique challenge for veterans, is to understand the larger landscape that they need to be able to understand and learn how to operate within.”
Still, his service gave him deep expertise in areas where the skills needed for military operations overlap with those required in a global technology firm — teamwork, for example.
“A team is really a group that understands that we are sacrificing a small part of our individuality, but we’re coming together for a common good, a common goal,” Rackow said.