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Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

Laszlo Bock (Goodreads Author)

4.17 · Rating details · 12,384 ratings · 967 reviews

From the visionary head of Google's innovative People Operations comes a groundbreaking inquiry into the philosophy of work-and a blueprint for attracting the most spectacular talent to your business and ensuring that they succeed.

"We spend more time working than doing anything else in life. It's not right that the experience of work should be so demotivating and dehumani ...more

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Hardcover, 406 pages

Published April 7th 2015 by Twelve (first published January 1st 2015)

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Start your review of Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

Oct 01, 2015 Otis Chandler rated it it was amazing

Recommended to Otis by: Stephanie

Shelves: business, nonfiction, leadership, self-improvement, education

I think this is a must read for any leader in a modern business. Google has done a lot of things right both in their products and also in how they run their company and build their culture, and this is a fairly detailed account of how they've built an impressive culture, and is written by someone who knows - their head of HR. I'm a little surprised he told as much as he did - but I suppose it will only help for recruiting.

Goodreads is now a subsidiary of Amazon, and I have spent significant tim ...more

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Apr 11, 2015 Michael Scott rated it really liked it

Shelves: compsci-tech, startup, thought, my-favs, memoir, non-fiction

Laszlo Bock's Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

Overall, I really liked this book. I learned much and discovered even more. Multumesc mult, Laszlo!

Main positives:

1. In the end, and in bits throughout the book, the reader discovers that Google uses not so much a ground-breaking process, but rather a data-driven iteration of well-known HR (and to some extent also managerial) processes.

2. Very good analysis of many HR processes, including detailed an ...more

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Aug 16, 2015 Jurgen Appelo rated it it was amazing

Shelves: human-resources

This should be the new gospel for HR.

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May 13, 2015 Rick rated it it was amazing

Disclosure: I've worked at Google for 8 years, and have known Laszlo for much of that time. I'm a big fan of his, and have worked closely with several of his teams over the years. With that out of the way:

This is a spectacular book, and would be well worth your time whether you're early in your career and trying to figure out what kind of company you want to work for, or you're later in your career and are responsible for the careers of those who work for you. Laszlo lays out much of what makes ...more

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Jul 08, 2017 Peter rated it liked it

Did this book transform how I live and lead? No. It's nowhere near as revolutionary or life changing as its subtitle would have you believe. It has a lot of interesting ideas, made even more interesting since they're from the context of Google. I'm sure most people have heard or seen glimpses of how Google supposedly works and treats their people, so having a book where those are explicitly divulged was nice. As with most business books, there were concepts I agreed with and a bunch I didn't see ...more

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May 04, 2015 L.A. Starks rated it it was amazing

This is a superb book about making work happier, better, and more productive that should be read by...well, everyone who works in an organization of any size. The author is the head of Google's People Operations.

Page after page of Bock's book highlight the unconventional and successful approaches Google has taken to its employees: from the big upfront investment in hiring, to taking authority away from managers, to Googlegeist, to interest clubs. Moreover, Bock and his team make an extraordinary This is a superb book about making work happier, better, and more productive that should be read by...well, everyone who works in an organization of any size. The author is the head of Google's People Operations.

Page after page of Bock's book highlight the unconventional and successful approaches Google has taken to its employees: from the big upfront investment in hiring, to taking authority away from managers, to Googlegeist, to interest clubs. Moreover, Bock and his team make an extraordinary effort to quantify current practices and test new ones. It is HR done the Google/big data way, something that has allowed this team of engineers to expand from two people in Silicon Valley to fifty thousand across the globe.

I have a few negative points; however, they don't change my recommendation.

1) Readers should understand that in California, where Google is headquartered, a legal clause known as a non-compete cannot be enforced as it can elsewhere in the U.S. Bock never mentions this, but it is the reason and basis for the lavish, and thoughtful, benefits tech companies offer. They have to try harder to get employees to stay.

2) I was surprised to see very few mentions of child care and none of elder care. There are also no references in the index. For two parents who work full-time, child care is the third full-time job--on-site child care can become more significant a benefit than any other. Small start-up energy companies offer on-site child care. Google apparently does, too, but there is no mention of it in the book.

3) While there is ample mention of the discussions behind Google's decision to operate in and then pull back from China, I see no similar discussion or transparency about Googler head Eric Schmidt's decision to line up vast amounts of tech and human resources for Obama's 2012 campaign (that is for the Democratic presidential campaign, but not the Republican or even libertarian presidential campaigns) http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/... Thus, there's no transparency and no discussion for a company that wouldn't consider similar micro-targeting and big data usage to, for example, buy and sell stocks.

...more

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May 09, 2018 Arthur Meursault rated it did not like it

Probably would have made a better Powerpoint presentation than a book.

Laszlo Bock starts Work Rules by telling the reader the names of all the important people Laszlo Bock has met and worked with, and it goes downhill from there. Did you know that Laszlo cold-called 8 HR executives at GE and Pepsi because he wanted to work there, but only Anne Abaya at GE (I've never heard of her either) returned his call? Six weeks later, he was hired as (please note the capital letters) Vice President of Compe Probably would have made a better Powerpoint presentation than a book.

Laszlo Bock starts Work Rules by telling the reader the names of all the important people Laszlo Bock has met and worked with, and it goes downhill from there. Did you know that Laszlo cold-called 8 HR executives at GE and Pepsi because he wanted to work there, but only Anne Abaya at GE (I've never heard of her either) returned his call? Six weeks later, he was hired as (please note the capital letters) Vice President of Compensation and Benefits of the Commercial Equipment Financing Division of the GE Capital Division of the General Electric Company because Laszlo is the f**king sh*t. His first boss was Michael Evans. Haven't heard of Michael Evans? What about his CEO at the time Jack Welch? Or his chief HR officer Bill Conaty? Maybe you know Martha Josephson, the recruiter at Google who begged Laszlo to join them?

No?

Well, f*ck you.

When he isn't reciting the phonebook, Laszlo likes to tell you about how hard were the early lives of all the rich people at Google. It's not enough just to say they started out as normal, moderately wealthy, middle-class people who had good education and opportunities offered to them at the right time. No. Every one of them came from a harrowing history. Laszlo's parents were persecuted in Communist Russia and didn't even see a banana till their thirties. Larry Page and Sergei Brin weren't just the founders of Google, Larry's grandpa suffered class warfare in his bluecollar job, and Sergei's family were nearly slaughtered in Soviet anti-Semitic progroms. Thank Jehova that they all ended up becoming very very very rich, because according to this book nobody deserves it more than them. It's like how every winner of a TV singing contest needs a tragic backstory before they can win the finale.

And this is before you've even finished Chapter One.

If you can keep your eyes open, the rest of this 406 page self-laudatory wankrag is a thick sticky wad of empty platitudes, virtue signaling and utter tosh.

I was forced to read this book and honestly it was only because I was forced to read this book that I could finish it. Tears of boredom were rolling down my cheeks as I read through Laszlo's 112th back-slapping reach-around.

Don't read this book. It has a high rating on Goodreads because idiotic middle managers who want to be seen to have the right thoughts and/or hope they can get noticed by Google one day will award this book five stars. They're idiots. Don't be one of them. If you really want to transform your life, learn plumbing or start doing weight lifting. You'll learn far more than this waste of paper thinks it can teach you. ...more

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Jul 17, 2017 Izette rated it really liked it

It's a tough one to review as it's possibly quite personal for me being in HR. I can so relate to some of the issues experienced but also find it helpful to look at it from a more data driven perspective. I am always struck by how your frame of mind impacts your experience of a book. If you're ready to hear it, you want to hear more. When you're not ready, it's not so fun to read. I had a bit of both during this both.

One thought I had was that this book will make more people want to apply at Goo ...more

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Apr 28, 2015 Kim Leandersson rated it really liked it

Actually one of the best books I've ever read in the area of people management and about HR organization. Of course the book is filled with google anecdotes but if you filter out the propaganda there is a deep and very interesting understanding about performance management, about what drives people and result, about that you need to be unfair instead of looking at bell curves, about constant feedback and most interesting of all, lots and lots of examples of how to be data driven in your HR work. ...more

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Jan 23, 2018 Omri Reis rated it it was amazing

This book is extremely recommended to three types of readers: First, managers, who will find it useful for developing talent and getting more value and productivity from their existing teams. Second, any HR professional who will find great insights about hiring, interviewing and empowering people, and lastly, any employee who wants to grow, “be a founder” (as Bock puts it) and achieve meaningful impact with their work. Personally, I think the book can also serve as a great branding book for anyo
This book is extremely recommended to three types of readers: First, managers, who will find it useful for developing talent and getting more value and productivity from their existing teams. Second, any HR professional who will find great insights about hiring, interviewing and empowering people, and lastly, any employee who wants to grow, “be a founder” (as Bock puts it) and achieve meaningful impact with their work. Personally, I think the book can also serve as a great branding book for anyone who wants to build a people-driven organization, that fosters a unique culture and community.

Despite the title, and Laszlo Bock’s position, this book is not about Google but rather an inside look on Google’s experience of implementing insights drawn from academic research (including behavioral economics, organizational psychology and business management, among others) or other companies’ experience (like GM or McKinsey). While it is true that the writer, naturally, advocates Google’s culture products and services (this is part of his life’s work after all), he is also very honest and forthcoming about Google’s failures and the mistakes.

More specifically, I found these ideas especially compelling:

1. The simple insight of always hiring people better than you. Companies believe that as they grow, they increasingly require more “labourers”, when in fact, the opposite is true - the more a company grows the more it requires talented people to maintain its success. This also connects with Bock’s idea of “becoming a founder” - meaning that not only at work (but also with family and friends) people want to leave their own, unique legacy and make a personal impact on a collective. Later, this also connects to academic research validating the importance of intrinsic motivations (like a belief in the company’s mission, values and people) over extrinsic motivations like pay or benefits.
2. The two tails chapter, in which Bock shows that people in organizations do not follow a normal distribution pattern but more of a power low distribution pattern. This happens since the hiring process is supposed to ensure that only the top people even enter the company. Therefore, the reality is that any company has a just a handful of superstars and a lot of more “average” or “weaker” employees. Bock’s solution for this is two-fold - first, he shows how paying unfairly to top talent is immensely important for retaining the best employees, and second he focuses on why it is paramount to focus on your weakest employees (which are not weak at all since they were hired in the first place) and help them find their place in the organization, grow and thrive.
3. The chapter on training is quite convincing in showing how companies actually save money by letting their employees teach and train one another. This follows the idea that the majority of a company’s budget should go to hiring, and not to training. The second part of this chapter follows a winning process for building a learning institution, which starts by practicing simple tasks, getting very detailed, timely and meaningful feedback, and eventually testing training results based on employees’ behavioral change instead of just testing knowledge.
4. The illuminating chapter on Google’s hiring process which attempts to avoid the inevitable interview bias and favoritism. Candidates evaluation comes from many sources, including third parties and people from unrelated fields and departments.
5. The separation of performance and development, followed by the separation of pay discussions and performance reviews. Bock shows the behavioral and psychological effects this standardized, formal procedures have on employees, and explains how to avoid them buy tweaking and playing with the timing and nature of feedback. For me, this managed to show the difference between “HR”, top-to-bottom corporate thinking and “People Operations” - which views these procedures from the employees standpoint. This whole process is sliced and deconstructed even further with a very useful “calibration” mechanism that essentially “filters” any feedback that is unjustified, counterproductive or just not constructive enough.

The book is written in a very straight-forward style (it actually reads like a TED talk on occasion) and makes for a very smooth and easy read. I also found it useful that every chapter has a Google-style checklist that summarizes the main ideas. This style makes it read more like a guide-book sometimes, but you’ll soon find out it is a very convincing, data and research-driven guide book, with invaluable lessons for the way you think about work and life.
...more

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Mar 13, 2015 Lori Tatar rated it it was amazing

I received Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead by Laszlo Bock from Goodreads and am so glad I did! This book will take what you "know" about leadership and employees and throw it out the window.

Okay, sure, there are inevitably people who will need to be micro-managed...but you don't want them to be your employees. Learn to manage how you like to be managed. Learn to encourage productivity and remove obstacles instead of drilling down to the minutiae ...more

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Jun 18, 2017 Gwen (The Gwendolyn Reading Method) rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: best-nonfiction

While I haven't quite drank the kool-aid that Google is the bestest place ever to work and has HR all figured out, they certainly have studied it more than anyone else and this book is thought-provoking and definitely gets the juices flowing on better ways to do things! ...more

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Aug 04, 2017 Steve rated it really liked it

Shelves: nonfiction, read-in-2017

This book was given to me by my supervisor with the intent that I would find some takeaways that we could apply to our office.

This was an interesting read, and the author provided many, many anecdotes supporting his main statements. It was well-written, and there are indeed several things that could be applied to an workplace, large or small. Google isn't a perfect company by any means, but they do good by their employees, that's for sure. ...more

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May 19, 2015 Suzanne rated it it was amazing

Great read - lots of valuable information presented in an engaging way, with just the right amount of humor. Kudos to Laszlo Bock for being so willing to share what they've learned works at Google.

One interesting sidenote: Google uses OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) to set its business goals. John Doerr, from Kleiner Perkins, introduced this system to Google when the company was only a year old. He also introduced them to Amazon. Part of me is wondering just how many other companies have been Great read - lots of valuable information presented in an engaging way, with just the right amount of humor. Kudos to Laszlo Bock for being so willing to share what they've learned works at Google.

One interesting sidenote: Google uses OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) to set its business goals. John Doerr, from Kleiner Perkins, introduced this system to Google when the company was only a year old. He also introduced them to Amazon. Part of me is wondering just how many other companies have been influenced by Doerr in this way. You can learn more about OKRs here: https://www.gv.com/lib/how-google-set...

I also have to share this: Google offers five months of maternity leave. New parents receive full salary, bonus and stock vesting for the entire time they are on leave. Plus $500 bonus to help make life a bit easier - eg. ordering home delivery of meals for the first few weeks. What data did they use to make the decision to offer this? When they looked at attrition for women after childbirth, it was twice their average attrition rate. They found that many moms coming back to work after 12 weeks felt "stressed, tired, and sometimes guilty." After Google introduced the new leave, the difference in attrition rates vanished. Interestingly, moms were often using the extra two months to transition slowly back to work, which helped make them more effective and happier when the leave ended.

“When we eventually did the math, it turned out this program cost nothing. The cost of having a mom out of the office for an extra couple of months was more than offset by the value of retaining her expertise and avoiding the cost of finding and training a new hire."

I also thought this was good perspective for thinking about culture in a company:

"If you embark down this path [culture of transparency, etc], the road will be bumpy. Culture isn’t static. Googles, for example, have said: 'Google’s culture is changing and it’s not the company I joined anymore.' 'I remember when we had just a few hundred people - it was a totally different company. Now we feel like any other big company.' 'We’re just not a fun place anymore.'

Each of these quotations is from someone bemoaning that Google has lost its way.

The first quote is from the year 2000 (less than a few hundred employees), the second from 2006 (six thousand employees) and the last is from 2012 (fifty thousand employees - especially ironic because the word Googlers most used to describe Google’s culture in that year was “fun”!) In fact, at every point in Google’s history, there has been a sense that the culture was degrading. Almost every Googler longs for the halcyon days of Google’s youth … which they tend to define as what Google was like in their first few months. This is a reflection of both how wonderfully inspiring the first few months at Google can be and how quickly Google continues to evolve.
We enjoy a constant paranoia about losing the culture, and a constant, creeping sign of dissatisfaction with the current culture. That is a good sign! This feeling of teetering on the brink of losing our culture causes us to be vigilant about threats to it. I’d be concerned if people stopped worrying.
One way to address this worry is to be open to the discussion and to channel any frustration into efforts to bolster the culture."

Highly recommended read.

...more

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Sep 03, 2015 Sebastian Gebski rated it it was amazing

Damn you Googlers!

It's the 3rd book "by-Googler-about-Google" I've read & it's at least as good as the prev ones ("How Google Tests Software" & "How Google Works") - and most likely even better. Quite surprisingly, because it's written by an HR guy & it presents his perspective (which is obviously insanely extensive & thorough, but it's not an engineering perspective - something that majority of readers expects).

Anyway. Pros:
* tons of RL examples & stories - not trivial ones that could & have ha ...more

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Jan 14, 2016 Sajith rated it it was amazing

This book ‘Work Rules’ by Laszlo Block is very nice book and its regarding the work culture, recruitment process and regarding the performance management in Google. Best part which i like was their recruitment process in google - they take lot of effort to take their googlers because they conceder their employees as a valuable resource. They all do lot of activities in google to develop go oglers skill by ask question from different department so the employees will start learning from something ...more

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Jun 23, 2016 Lukasz Nalepa rated it it was amazing

Shelves: owned, read-best, read-work

Without a doubt, this is THE most valuable book I have read this year. Goes directly to my "must read" shelf, that I'm constantly recommending to everone I know :) For me, this book is not necessarily about Google, or HR department. This book is about how to stay sane and humane on daily basis. Moreover, many ideas in this book just lay there and beg to be implemented! :) ...more

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Oct 02, 2016 Piotr Uryga rated it it was amazing

Very insightful and interesting on how one could build successful company. I'm not fan of heavyweight performance review process, but Google's data driven approach to run HR people operations is amazing.
Focus on hiring great talent is also something that every executive should read about. ...more

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Jun 13, 2015 Eirika rated it did not like it

Read the two-three sentence summaries at the end of each chapter, skip the rest.

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Apr 07, 2019 Azzaz rated it it was amazing

For HR professionals and People who want to learn how to live and lead reading this book.
■●■Reread■●■

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Sep 22, 2017 Rob Thompson rated it liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, 2017-challenge, reviewed, blinkist

About the book: Work Rules! takes us through the inner workings of Google, one of the most powerful and successful companies in the world. Bock tells us precisely how Google pulls off this feat while consistently being ranked as the best employer in the world.

About the author: Laszlo Bock is the senior vice president of People Operations at Google. He is responsible for attracting, developing and retaining more than 50,000 “Googlers” based around the world. During his time there, Google has been About the book: Work Rules! takes us through the inner workings of Google, one of the most powerful and successful companies in the world. Bock tells us precisely how Google pulls off this feat while consistently being ranked as the best employer in the world.

About the author: Laszlo Bock is the senior vice president of People Operations at Google. He is responsible for attracting, developing and retaining more than 50,000 “Googlers” based around the world. During his time there, Google has been recognized as an outstanding employer over 100 times, holding a number one spot in rankings in the United States and 16 other countries.

My highlights:
The secret to Google’s culture is its mission, transparency and voice. Google’s mission is simple and powerful: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”It’s a profound mission because firstly, it gives moral, rather than commercial meaning to employees’ work.
Second, the mission has no ceiling.
Another key tenet of Google’s successful culture is its transparency.
Hire the best people by looking beyond their degrees and focusing on the right kind of training. There are two ways to have an exceptional employee: hire the best or train the average. As you may already have guessed, Google does the former.
Let your people – with the help of data – run the show. If you really want employees to own their jobs, do as Google does, liquidate status symbols and reduce bureaucratic hierarchy.Google’s most senior executives receive the same support, like resources and funding, as new employees and there are only four levels in the hierarchy: individual contributor, manager, director and vice president.
Both your best and worst employees represent opportunities for your company – seize them! If you’ve worked in an office before, you’re probably familiar with the classic pattern of employee performance: a small number of top performers are responsible for most of the successes, and everyone else trails behind them with gradually decreasing performance.The best and worst performers make up the two tails of the performance curve. Both are the minority, while most employees are average performers, sitting in the middle of the curve.Most companies fire poor performers, then hire new employees who require extra training and can’t guarantee excellent performance. Even worse, companies also tend not to utilize their top performers.So how does Google use these two tails to its advantage? They place outstanding performers under the microscope and help out those who need to make improvements.Most companies also don’t think to study their best performers. This a missed opportunity, as these are the people most familiar with best practices.How, then, do you study the best performers? Harvard professor Boris Groysberg’s research shows high performance is dependent on context. That means studying other companies’ best practices won’t help; you must study your own.
Stop wasting resources on bad training, and use the best teachers within your own company. the best way to master a skill is to split the work into smaller tasks and aim for a specific improvement in one of these small tasks through repetition, feedback and correction.
Training should deliver specific information that people will retain.
First, the basic principles are taught, then consultants roleplay a scenario, and observe and discuss a video of their training. This process is repeated until the desired consultant behavior is achieved.
When Google needs a trainer for sales representatives, it seeks out the best sales manager with the maximum amount of total sales and asks them to instruct lower performing sales representatives.When employees train other employees, not only does it save money, but it also creates a more close-knit community.
Sometimes Google rewards failure and pays people unfairly. Why? Google also learned there are often more effective ways to retain employees: offer experience rather than money.
Their mistake was rewarding with money instead of experiences, like a dinner for two or a team trip to Hawaii. It turned out these special occasions created more memories and brought teams together far better than cash could. ...more

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Jul 24, 2017 Chris rated it liked it

Some useful insights. Nothing earth-shattering, but there's some practical stuff that I think I can use as a manager.

Even though there are some innovations coming from Google, I find their approach surprisingly traditional. For example, they haven't made any "out there" changes like making everyone's salary public, or similar fads. It's good to hear that they also try new things and bump their heads like any other company. I guess the luxury they have is that they can run small scale experiment ...more

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Oct 01, 2017 Matt McAlear rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites, business

A very thought provoking book! I don't agree with everything in the book, maybe 70% or so, but even the stuff I don't agree with is very interesting to think about.

Here's a few takeaways I got from the book:
- Everyone can look at themselves as a founder even if it's within their own department. Having this outlook instills ownership and responsibility that invokes positive action.
- Typical management responsibilities don't always make sense at every level of the company and could be beneficial A very thought provoking book! I don't agree with everything in the book, maybe 70% or so, but even the stuff I don't agree with is very interesting to think about.

Here's a few takeaways I got from the book:
- Everyone can look at themselves as a founder even if it's within their own department. Having this outlook instills ownership and responsibility that invokes positive action.
- Typical management responsibilities don't always make sense at every level of the company and could be beneficial to remove certain responsibilities from managers such as hiring / firing / performance reviews / compensation / etc...
- Hire people in collaboration. Have the manager, the peer, and the subordinate all come in on the interview. Have a third party or two involved in the interview process as well. The goal should be to hire exceptional people only.
- Google allows you to pick your own job title in an attempt to deemphasize its importance. As Google strives to be non-hierarchical this approach seems in line with what they stand for. I wonder how something like this would work in the army??
- People at Google make up their own work hours essentially. They work as needed and are driven by results not time. They are then assessed by their peers and others to determine whether or not they are cutting it.
- Google institutes a concept called 20% time that they informally track to empower their employees to think outside the box and use their ideas for the company.
-Laszlo argues that you should pay your top employees unfairly. That your best employees produce work 2, 3, or even 10 times what your average performer do. He argues that your work resembles more of a power law distribution than a normal distribution being that your top performers bring up the median significantly. Thus, you should pay your super stars 2, 3 or even 10 times what you pay your average person. This seems odd to me personally that someone on the team could be producing 10X the average performer on the team. Need to research this more.
- Google Gyst is Google's annual survey of the company they do each year. 90% of the company participates. 100 questions are asked on a 5 point scale and 30 to 50% of the questions are changed each year to reflect the companies changes.

To be fair on both sides of my thought process, I find it hard believe that Google is a company run by committee (or wisdom of the crowds). I believe that this is a good concept until things are completely run by the masses. Would a company loose it's identity? Can a company really stand for anything if it's ran by the masses? Does the company loose agility and speed to the market?

All and all, I am very thankful Laszlo put together this book and have found it immensely helpful. Thanks! ...more

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Oct 19, 2018 Alexandra rated it really liked it

yes! a book with actionable steps - overviews and teeny details. will read again.

I loved the surveys to see how people are collaborating in teams and which managers are doing well and what that means to their teams. double blind manager studies show 8 (admittedly bland) traits of good managers:
1) be a good coach - think about employee strengths and circumstances before 1:1s to partner with employees t make solutions
2) empower without micromanaging
3) express interest in team-member success and pe ...more

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Nov 26, 2017 Pritesh rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: books-2016

Interesting insights on how Google works, Googlers make decisions and learn from their wins and losses. A couple things that stood out for me were 1) the willingness to experiment - there are always a number of small experiments running. Without the fear of, we may be stuck with this if it does not work. 2) Learning and systemizing from what makes the successful people successful in Google. Overall a good read. Can be a tad self congratulatory at times :)

My notes.

1. Checklist for managers is ver ...more

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Jul 07, 2017 Jacques Bezuidenhout rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This book shouldn't be taken as some sort of HR Bible. It is purely the perspective of how Google does things, and what works for them.

A lot of the things they do, simply isn't practical or possible in small / non-billion dollar revenue companies.
That being said, there are a tons of small things in the book that any company can do to:
1. Hire the right people
2. Keep your best people
3. Build a strong culture
4. Be transparent
5. Show compassion
6. Trust people

I fully agree with a bunch of ideas:
1. Fl ...more

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Feb 05, 2017 Alexa rated it really liked it

Shelves: non-fiction

Very insightful. I enjoyed this book a lot, though I did find it a bit lengthy and repetitive at times.
Overall, I got a lot of valuable information. I can't currently apply most of the principles to my own work, but I think it's still good to be aware of them. ...more

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Aug 21, 2017 RC1140 rated it it was ok

Reasonably ok and interesting book regarding some of the directions that google have taken , as usual dont cargo cult what is presented. There are some interesting concepts and information presented, but they would be best applied by someone in HR.

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Jun 09, 2018 Askorbinka rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

I am sure, somewhat idealistically, that work shouldn’t be miserable, it can be energizing and exciting. This book is about how to make a work such a place from the Google HR’s perspective. A lot of cases, examples, even cases of failures. Very clear structure, tons of references I’d like to read someday, too.

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Feb 26, 2017 Erika RS rated it really liked it

Shelves: leadership, owned

This book was kind of boring... and that's a mark a high praise.

I've worked at Google for a decade, as a manager for nearly half of that. This book really does describe the way that Google structures the workplace to create an innovative environment. If I hadn't been a bit bored, if I had been surprised, it probably would have been because the book didn't ring true. Instead, this book explores examples of what has worked and what hasn't worked at Google to create a strong culture.

The first two This book was kind of boring... and that's a mark a high praise.

I've worked at Google for a decade, as a manager for nearly half of that. This book really does describe the way that Google structures the workplace to create an innovative environment. If I hadn't been a bit bored, if I had been surprised, it probably would have been because the book didn't ring true. Instead, this book explores examples of what has worked and what hasn't worked at Google to create a strong culture.

The first two chapters of the book set up some framing philosophy. If you want to create an innovative environment, think like a founder. Feel like you have responsibility for and power to change the culture and working conditions around you, even if it's just for your team. Then give people freedom to do the same for themselves. Freedom and it's closely related sibling, transparency, can be intimidating boons to grant. It will be abused from time to time, but the net gains in innovation, productivity, and happiness will offset those occasional losses.

The next three chapters talk about hiring and it's role in creating a culture of innovation. Find the best people for the job, even if it takes more time. Move away from interviewing on instinct; standardize the interview process. Google does this by having candidates interview with multiple interviewers, some to all of them not on the team the candidate will be working on (it varies by role), and then having the hiring decision made by a committee that is separate from the interviewers.

Once good people are hired, allow them to be innovative. It's not uncommon for hiring to look for the best people and then constrain them until they are no more than average. A key action is to take power away from managers and spread it out. Managers are important. Laszlo discusses Project Oxygen which determined the attributes that make a manager great and helped Google understand why good managers are important[1][2]. But to foster a culture of ownership and innovation, it's important to take away potentially destructive sources of power that managers have such as sole discretion over hiring, firing, salary, and promotion. The book also goes into detailed discussion about Google's philosophy in some of these areas.

Google is known for its benefits, and Laszlo spends a fair amount of time talking about some of our benefits and why they matter. Google targets its benefits so that they increase employee efficiency, community (both internal and external), and innovation; some benefits, such as the survivor benefit for an employees death, we have because they're just the right thing to do. If a benefit doesn't have a positive impact in one of these areas, it's not useful. Another interesting thing is that most of these benefits are not expensive. Food and transportation certainly are, but many other benefits are cheap or free.

The most interesting thing to me is that many of these benefits stem from a single core benefit: giving employees the freedom and time to act on their ideas. Whether it's arranging talks from internal or external speakers on a diverse array of topics, diversity groups setting up both bridging and boding activities, or culture clubs setting up fun events like regular live music performance by Googlers, a lot of what makes Google googley comes from people whose job description doesn't say anything about culture.

Even if I was a little bored at times, I'm glad I read this book. Although things are always changing -- some of the details in this book are already out of date -- the core ideas are worth understanding for anyone who wants to foster a culture of innovation.

(As an aside, this book is probably still worth reading even if you are a Googler. It brings together a lot of the philosophy and history behind why Google does People Ops the way it does. For those who didn't live through the development of these systems, it's good to learn the bigger picture. For those that did, it's good to remember.)

[1] https://rework.withgoogle.com/guides/...

[2] It's a pity the gteams research wasn't ready to be part of that book. The research about what makes great teams is even more important than Oxygen, in my opinion: https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/fi... ...more

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About Laszlo Bock

Laszlo Bock

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Laszlo Bock leads Google's people function, responsible for attracting, developing, retaining, and delighting "Googlers." He believes that giving people freedom and supplementing our instincts with hard science are steps on the path to making work meaningful and people happy.

Laszlo's first book, WORK RULES!, is available for pre-order now and will come out on April 7, 2015. As of January 2015 it ...more