How Google Works

by Eric Schmidt

we measured along five axes—speed (fast is always better than slow), accuracy (how relevant are the results to the user’s query?), ease of use (can everyone’s grandparents use Google?), comprehensiveness (are we searching the entire Internet?), and freshness (how fresh are the results?).

Getting everyone to say yes in a meeting doesn’t mean you have agreement, it means you have a bunch of bobbleheads. Many leaders strive for “consensus-driven” decisions, but they fundamentally misunderstand the meaning of consensus. For those of you who skipped Latin, it stems from the Latin cum, meaning “together with,” and sentire, meaning “to think or feel,” so it literally means “to think or feel together.” Note that this implies nothing about unanimity; consensus is not about getting everyone to agree. Instead, it’s about coming to the best idea for the company and rallying around it.

The most effective leaders today don’t hoard information, they share it. (Bill Gates in 1999: “Power comes not from

Most of the best—and busiest—people we know act quickly on their emails, not just to us or to a select few senders, but to everyone. Being responsive sets up a positive communications feedback loop whereby your team and colleagues will be more likely to include you in important discussions

Remember the old OHIO acronym: Only Hold It Once. If you read the note and know what needs doing, do it right away. Otherwise you are dooming yourself to rereading it, which is 100 percent wasted time.

Handle email in LIFO order (Last In First Out). Sometimes the older stuff gets taken care of by someone else.

consider who else would find it useful.

When you use the bcc (blind copy) feature, ask yourself why. The answer is almost always that you are trying to hide something, which is counterproductive and potentially knavish in a transparent culture. When that is your answer, copy the person openly or don’t copy them at all. The only time we recommend using the bcc feature is when you are removing someone from an email thread.

Sometimes the most effective way to help change and innovation outrun the antibodies of corporate entropy is a simple one: Ask the hardest question. Understanding what you do about the future, what do you see for the business that others may not, or may see but choose to ignore?

In ongoing companies there are always hard questions, and they often don’t get asked because there aren’t any good answers and that makes people uncomfortable. But this is precisely why they should be asked—to keep the team uncomfortable. Better for that discomfort to come from friendly fire than from a competitor intent on killing you for real—as Eric learned at Sun. If there aren’t good answers to the hardest questions, then there is at least a silver lining. Those hardest questions that have no easy answers can be very effective in mitigating the risk-averse, change-fighting tendencies of big-company culture.

Start by asking what could be true in five years.