How Google Works

by Eric Schmidt

We then cover strategy, because smart creatives are most attracted to ideas that are grounded in a...

business plans aren’t nearly as important as the pillars upon w...

hiring, which is the most important thing a leader does. Hire enough great people, and the resulting intellectual mixture will inevitabl...

the only way to achieve sustained success is through continuous product excellence, and an environment of innovative primordial ooze is the only way to get there.

Employees expect much more from their companies now, and they are often not getting it. This is an opportunity:

create the next big thing. All you need is the insight that your industry is transforming at a rapid pace, the guts to take a risk and be part of that transformation, and the willingness and ability to attract the best smart creatives and lead them to make it happen.

Culture—Believe Your Own Slogans

Jeff and gang had a clear understanding of their company’s priorities, and knew they had the freedom to try to solve any big problem that stood in the way of success. If they had failed, no one would have chastised them in any way, and when they succeeded, no one—even on the ads team—was jealous of their progress. But it wasn’t Google’s culture that turned those five engineers into problem-solving ninjas who changed the course of the company over the weekend. Rather it was the culture that attracted the ninjas to the company in the first place.

Many people, when considering a job, are primarily concerned with their role and responsibilities, the company’s track record, the industry, and compensation. Further down on that list, probably somewhere between “length of commute” and “quality of coffee in the kitchen,” comes culture.

What we don't want

Smart creatives, though, place culture at the top of the list. To be effective, they need to care about the place they work. This is why, when starting a new company or initiative, culture is the most important thing to consider.

Elsewhere in this book we preach the value of experimentation and the virtues of failure, but culture is perhaps the one important aspect of a company where failed experiments hurt.

Once established, company culture is very difficult to change, because early on in a company’s life a self-selection tendency sets in. People who believe in the same things the company does will be drawn to work there, while people who don’t, won’t.

The smart approach is to ponder and define what sort of culture you want at the outset of your company’s life. And the best way to do that is to ask the smart creatives who form your core team, the ones who know the gospel and believe in it as much as you do.

Culture stems from founders, but it is best reflected in the trusted team the founders form to launch their venture. So ask that team: What do we care about? What do we believe? Who do we want to be? How do we want our company to act and make decisions?

The difference, though, between successful companies and unsuccessful ones is whether employees believe the words.

speech to his managers that companies exist to “do something worthwhile—they make a contribution to society…. You can look around and still see people who are interested in money and nothing else, but the underlying drives come largely from a desire to do something else—to make a product, to give a service, generally to do something which is of value.”

David Packard

one of Google’s stated values has always been to “Focus on the User.” If we changed that, perhaps by putting the needs of advertisers or publishing partners first, our inboxes would be flooded, and outraged engineers

Employees always have a choice, so belie your values at your own risk.

those values should clearly and plainly outline the things that matter most to the company, the things you care about. Otherwise they are meaningless, and won’t be worth a damn when it comes to helping that smart creative make the right call.

What values would you want that bleary-eyed employee to consider? Write them down in a simple, concise way. Then share them, not in posters and guides, but through constant, authentic communications.

Jack Welch said in Winning: “No vision is worth the paper it’s printed on unless it is communicated constantl...

codify the values that would guide the company’s actions and decisions. And not just the most important actions and decisions and not just management’s actions and decisions, but everyone’s actions and decisions, big and small, every day.

dazzling array of amenities available to employees: volleyball courts, bowling alleys, climbing walls and slides, gyms with personal trainers and lap pools, colorful bikes to get from building to building, free gourmet cafeterias, and numerous kitchens stocked with all sorts of snacks, drinks, and top-of-the-line espresso machines.

Giving hardworking employees extra goodies is a Silicon Valley tradition dating back to the 1960s,

Larry and Sergey set out to create an environment similar to a university, where students have access to world-class cultural, athletic, and academic facilities… and spend most of their time working their butts off.

their workspace and what will you find? A series of cubicles that are crowded, messy, and a petri dish for creativity.

Offices should be designed to maximize energy and interactions, not for isolation and status. Smart creatives thrive on interacting with each other. The mixture you get when you cram them together is combustible, so a top priority must be to keep them crowded.

the steady state should be highly interactive, with boisterous, crowded offices brimming with hectic energy. Employees should always have the option to retire to a quiet place when they’ve had it with all the group stimulation, which is why our offices include plenty of retreats: nooks in the cafés and microkitchens, small conference rooms, outdoor terraces and spaces, and even nap pods. But when they go back to their desk, they should be surrounded by their teammates.

Keeping people crowded also has the collateral benefit of killing facilities envy. When no one has a private office, no one complains about it.

We think it’s particularly important for teams to be functionally integrated.

In the Internet Century, a product manager’s job is to work together with the people who design, engineer, and develop things to make great products. Some of this entails the traditional administrative work around owning the product life cycle, defining the product roadmap, representing the voice of the consumer, and communicating all that to the team and management. Mostly, though, smart-creative product managers need to find the technical insights that make products better. These derive from knowing how people use the products (and how those patterns will change as technology progresses), from understanding and analyzing data, and from looking at technology trends and anticipating how they will affect their industry. To do this well, product managers need to work, eat, and live with their engineers

When offices get crowded, they tend to get messy too. Let them.

That random collection of stuff was an icon of a busy, stimulated workforce.

Messiness is not an objective in itself (if it was, we know some teens who would be great hires), but since it is a frequent by-product of self-expression and innovation, it’s usually a good sign.37 And squashing it, which we’ve seen in so many companies, can have a surprisingly powerful negative effect. It’s OK to let your office be one hot mess.

But while offices can be crowded and messy, they need to provide employees with everything they need to get the job done.

This is another way to kill facilities envy among smart creatives: Be very generous with the resources they need to do their work. Be stingy with the stuff that doesn’t matter, like fancy furniture and big offices, but invest in the stuff that does.

We invest in our offices because we expect people to work there, not from home.

Mervin Kelly, the late chairman of the board of Bell Labs, designed his company’s buildings to promote interactions between employees.38 It was practically impossible for an engineer or scientist to walk down the long halls without running into a colleague or being pulled into an office.

Make your offices crowded and load them with amenities, then expect people to use them.

When it comes to the quality of decision-making, pay level is intrinsically irrelevant and experience is valuable only if it is used to frame a winning argument.

His job as the hippo was to get out of the way if he felt his idea wasn’t the best. Sridhar also had a job to do: He had to speak up. For a meritocracy to work, it needs to engender a culture where there is an “obligation to dissent”.41 If someone thinks there is something wrong with an idea, they must raise that concern. If they don’t, and if the subpar idea wins the day, then they are culpable.

Others, though, may feel more uncomfortable raising dissenting views, particularly in a public forum. That’s why dissent must be an obligation, not an option.

Meritocracies yield better decisions and create an environment where all employees feel valued and empowered.

& they remove biases that can hamper greatness.

Organizational design is hard. What works when you’re small and in one location does not work when you get bigger and have people all over the world.

To help avoid this dance, the best approach is to put aside preconceived notions about how the company should be organized, and adhere to a few important principles.

First, keep it flat.

They prefer a flat organization, less because they want to be closer to the top and more because they want to get things done and need direct access to decision-makers.

The Google version suggests that managers have a minimum of seven direct reports

still have formal organization charts, but the rule (which is really more of a guideline, since there are exceptions) forces flatter charts with less managerial oversight and more employee freedom. With that many direct reports—most managers have a lot more than seven—there simply isn’t time to micromanage.