All Work and No Play

Google encourages their employees to spend at least a fifth of their week playing around and developing new ideas, personally I completely agree that “play” probably generates more creative output and is ideal for initiative and new ideas – but how do you allocate playtime, at Google there’s a volleyball game every day at noon and on site massages and yoga, judging by the success of the company we have to assume that all this partying is working, but can this culture be adopted into other organisations?  I can’t quite see them dragging a trampoline into the middle of our office and this helping innovation, telling your employees to play around, essentially asking them to be spontaneous to see what creative thinking this generates but then allocating times and ways to do this seems to belie the point really, little like being force-fed your favourite food, I think it has to be organic to the current company culture, reflecting and expanding on trends that are already in place.