Today, I start a series of posts (as I find the time), to explore what I like to call corporate badassitude. Wherein, I examine a company/enterprise, and on the basis of a few criteria (or more, or less, or none at all depending on my mood), I will postulate on the badassitude of that corporation or company or enterprise or its leadership or anything else in the corporation that I decide to talk about for the purpose of reaching a badassitude conclusion.

For our inaugural look for the purposes of declaring that a company is badass, I decided to take the very easy path. Today we will talk a little bit about Google. Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, then PhD students at Stanford. They posited that an algorithm that ranked pages based on the number and types of linking relationships with other pages would offered up better search results. They went against the grain at the time and decided to just do one thing – search. No content UI tricks, no gimmicks, etc. Just search. And they have been kicking ass since. As an aside, the Google search engine was first named “BackRub” – which does not have a badass ring to it. Then it was googol – which I think had a rather badass ring to it – before it was Google (which as a name is probably just neutrally badass).

Once they had the search thing nailed down, Google started to branch out, one direction at a time. At other times it looked like they were branching into many new directions at the same time. Sometimes, it seemed they did it just because it seemed interesting to them. And every time they did it, they seemed to kick ass. They have always been so badass and so confident in their badassitude that their prospectus specifically says to investors something to this effect “We are glad you invested in us but we couldn’t give a rats ass if you didn’t…” and they add “We will do whatever the fuck we want in whatever industry we want and if you don’t like it, you can go jump in the lake….” I am paraphrasing and exaggerating but that is just about what the prospectus said. Badassitude? I think so!

Ten years later, they have done what I thought would take forever for any company to do. They really, truly started to put some fear into Microsoft. For all intents and purposes, Google now has the Mobile OS of the future – even as all reasonable people agree that Mobile Windows must surely be declared dead. Google owns so much shit – from data to super powerful hardware, to data pipes, companies etc. And the rest of us do not know what they intend to do with. It will be interesting, should they ever get seriously challenged, to see the giant wake up and unleash the power they are sitting on.

Google has the inside track for leadership in cloud computing. And they keep doing things to Google Apps that with every small step, make desktop software a little bit more irrelevant. And it looks like they do something literally every day. Totally badass. The perpetual Beta is such a neat concept that even when a launch does not look as clean as it should (Buzz?), the almost casual introduction protects them from the hard hit that would come from screwing up a big launch. And because it always looks like Beta, they can make fixes without the brouhaha other would suffer for a simple fix.

I could go on and on about Google’s badassitude. But Google is badass more than anything else, for reinventing search, remaking search, leading search and indeed owning search. Pure. Badassitude! Period.

Watching Rachel Maddow on MSNC, doing her show from New Orleans. She is gangly, she is very academic, which means that she is very smart, she is a little easy on the eyes, but more than anything else, she is a badass.  We watched her from her early days as an analyst during the election and, uncharacteristically for liberal, she kicked conservative ass without any reservation. My girl, no pun intended has some serious balls! But more than that she takes incredible pains to educate and pursue informed discussion.  On the badassitude, she is in rarified territory.

Coming off last week’s playoff games, we had four badass teams, teaming with pure badassitude, going into the championship week. Two games were played. In the AFC, the Colts, despite a shaky first half, won handily. We knew they were badass. We knew they had gobbles of badassitude. Both things held. Two things were apparent and instructive, speaking of the total badassitude of the colts: a) The drive for a touchdown just before the end of the first half, and b) Watching their head coach, Jim Caldwell talk about the game at half time and what he thought they needed to and would do in the second half. Badassitude aplenty is what that was! The Jets were badass and to the extent possible, most of their badassitude held. They just ran into a superior Colts team. They lost, but one came away thinking they were badass and their badassitude held.

In the NFC championship game, the Vikings came in looking very badass. Across the board, led by Favre, Minnesota had proven without a doubt that they were badass. There was, again, badassitude aplenty on that team. And it held. Bret had his ass kicked every which way during the game. You saw clear indication that the old man was in with vicious young ‘uns. They knocked him down, pushed him around, roughed him up, but the old man kept picking himself  up, dusting himself off, and kicking ass himself. The team lost fumbles, were intercepted, were pushed around but they fought to the very end. Badass, were the Vikings, holding on, without a doubt to their badassitude!!

The Saints came into the game looking very badass. Yours truly thought they came with more badassitude than any other team coming into this championship weekend. Yours truly thinks they were the one team that left the weekend with decidedly less badassitude than they came in with. The offense seemed to hesitate, couldn’t quite figure out how to kick ass with the many turnovers and advantages they had, and mostly got lucky. Luck does not a badass make and is not the stuff of which badassitude is made. In an interesting irony, a winning team, the New Orleans Saints, came out of the championship weekend having lost the most badassitude of all the teams we watched. If I was a betting man, and I am not, and I discourage it, I would put my money on the Colts.

The other day, Jermaine Taylor dropped out of the Super Six. That was quite a fall. He quit. He was beaten, had lost one too many times for his, and all his fans’ liking and it was time for him to man-up and admit what had become obvious: At this moment, in this environment, in his condition, he did not belong in the Super Six.

Maybe we should have more of these Super Six kinds of tournaments, unglamorous as they might seem. You see, in boxing, it is easy for any comer to up and claim that he is good enough for this and that and the other title shot. That they should fight this and the other person. That they are ready. That so and so and the other is ducking them.

What is true though, is that if you picked 6 of the top fighters in any weight class, using a bunch of criteria to select the fighters, you will typically end up with a good representation of the top of that weight class. If then you ask the fighters you have selected to fight each other in a round robin tournament to determine who among them should earn the right to fight for the championship, you will if nothing else find out who is not only the badassest of the bunch, but more so, whose badassitude quotient can stand up to a comparison with, say the most venomous of serpents. One would; a) have to be real badass fight after fight to win, and b) ridiculously high in badassitude quotient to keep winning and c)dripping with pure badassitude to win it all.

For the longest time, I thought Jermaine Taylor was a badass and that from the way carried himself in and out of the ring, he had plenty of badassitude to spare. Then Pavlick kicked his ass. And then again. Before we knew it, he had lost 5 straight. I like to think that it is a credit to the abundance of badassitude he used to have that he was invited to the Super Six. But alas, I think he is done. In boxing, some guys last while others don’t. He lasted as long as he was going to. Jermaine Taylor is no longer a badass. Jermaine Taylor, as a boxer, no longer has any badassitude.

This one was an interesting study in the total lack of badassitude on the one hand, and the suprising display on the other. Democrats have for ever owned Massachussets senate seats. Ted Kennedy, who held one those seats forever, was a badass. Total bonafide badass. His politics was characterised by pure unadulterated badassitude. He worked for every single vote every single time. And he got his votes. And he kept his seat. For years and years and years. Then, bless his sould, he passed on.

The Democrats nominated one Coakley to replace him. She wins the nomination, and decides to take a long political nap. No political events, no rallies, no advertising, no polling. And the punk Democratic party leadership let her. From the White house to the local office. No one tried to wake her from her political nap. Old Ted was turning in his grave!! Meanwhile Brown, the Republican was working like a badass. Event after event, ads, his face in the papers. Badassitude worthy in fact of replacing Ted. Not even others in his party had believed he was a badass.

Then round about yesterday for all intents and purposes, some Democrat reading a newspaper noticed that they were about to have their ass kicked! And the scramble was on. But it was a punkass, no account effort to cover up for a total lack of political badassitude. The whole party leadership, top to bottom, fell asleep at the switch (side bar -these are the guys we are trusting with the economy and healthcare??). Their cowardly, complacent unprincipled gutlessness and lack of vision was exposed in a manner so totally unprecedented as to be completely incomprehensible. From failing to pass meaningful healthcare reform, to a cowardly retreat on change and their principles, they have finally reached the depths of their true incompetence. These shameless, gutless wonders have given away, in broad daylight, without a fight, one of the truly Democratic seats in all history, held by the lion, Ted, whose political badassitude was legendarily stratospheric.  There can not be a Democrat anywhere, indeed an American anywhere who must not feel, somewhere in their gut, a sense of betrayal if for no other reason than that these Democrats lay down to the opposition in public, even though we know that they have always laid down in private. I gotta take a shower!

For some, it is easy to confuse being a badass with having badassitude. The 2 things are different. A badass has capabilities in a particular area of life or endeavour that stand out when measured against other people’s abilities in the same area of endeavor. Badassitude is how one carries, manifests and internalizes that quality of being a badass. When one scores high on the badassitude scale, one’s effectiveness in the area in which they are badass is highly acute.  In a manner of speaking, a person who scores highly on the badassitude scale is, lethal. Tiger Woods for instance, in the specific endeavor of competitive golf is a badass who is literally off the charts on the badassitude scale. He is lethal. In golf.