Fast Company recently published its March 2010 cover story: The World's Most Innovative Companies.  In this issue, Ellen McGirt wrote a great profile about Facebook.  While reading the article, I was struck by the strong similarities between Facebook and Google regarding reinvention and innovation.

Google's Mindset
I've written in a previous blog post what I've learned about how Google approaches innovation / reinvention.  Google's attitude is to:

* Question everything
* Ask "why does this have to be the way it is?"
* Encourage engineers to push the envelope, to assume that their mission is to disrupt traditional ways of doing things

Facebook's Mindset
According to the Fast Company piece, "hacking" plays a key role in Facebook's corporate culture.  Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook's CEO) explains this process as:

* Being unafraid to break things in order to make them better
* The root of the hacker mindset is "there's a better way"
* Just because people have been doing it the same way since the beginning of time, I'm going to make it better

Here's a Facebook blog post written by Andrew Bosworth (a top Facebook engineer) called Working With Zuck.  Bosworth describes four (4) characteristics about working with the famous twenty-something CEO:

* Zuck Expects Debate
* Zuck Isn't Sentimental
* Zuck Experiences Things Contextually
* Zuck Pushes People 

This shows how great minds think alike, and it's no surprise that Facebook and Google ranked as #1 and #2 respectively in Fast Company's list of most innovative companies.

I know there's a lot currently being written about future businesses that Facebook and Google may compete in (i.e., vertical search), but I think the fiercest area of competition will be in the war for talent.  Check out this recruiting video Fast Company posted as part of the article.  There's no question both firms are targeting many of the same talented engineers: