It also happens when one department is perceived as an "expense" like IT or R&D, and starts pushing against "revenue-generating" departments like sales.
Of course, all components of a properly-functioning organization are revenue-generating. An idealized business in some respects would be people giving you money with no money being spent. Everyone knows that's not how the world works, but it's awfully hard to justify on a quarterly statement.
At Google, many departments aren't directly revenue-generating. Sure, Chrome and Android help people browse the Internet, where they view ads, but that's quite removed from actually selling the product, and those are very large projects. Search, maps, and gmail can show ads internally to generate revenue, but that's still a layer removed. Perhaps Google Apps and Drive are loss leaders, and maybe Fiber will make money eventually, but Glass? Calico? Driverless cars? Loon? Seriously, where does the money for these projects come from? I suppose you can answer "AdSense and AdWords", but why do those businesses give them money? And the harder question is how do they generate political and cultural capital to maintain these expenses?
At most of the companies I have been involved with, these projects would have been cut, outsourced, or consumed by the AdWords and AdSense teams. But there's little question that the world is better and the Internet is used more because of projects like Search, Gmail, Android, and Chrome.
How does Google generate this culture? How can other companies replicate this process?