How Google Works

by Eric Schmidt

and their primary objectives are lowering risk and ensuring that decisions are made only by the few execu...

This approach is designed to slow things down, and it accomplishes the task very well.

Meaning that at the very moment when businesses must permanently accelerate, their architecture is working against them.

Today’s work environment is radically different than it was in the twentieth century.

experimentation is cheap and the cost of failure—if done well—is much lower than it used to be. Plus, data used to be scarce and computing resources precious; today both are abundant, so there’s no need to hoard them. And collaboration is easy, across a room, a continent, or an ocean.

Put these factors together, and you suddenly have an environment where employees, from individual contributors to managers to executives...

Typically, the most valuable knowledge workers are the ones who thrive in the straitjacketed world of corporate process,

by building deep expertise in a narrow set of skills.

They don’t seek mobility; organizational status quo is where they excel.

this approach emphasizes the development of management skills, not technical ones.

As a result, most knowledge workers in traditional environments develop deep technical expertise but little breadth, or broad management expertise but no technical depth.

our Google peers represent a quite different type of employee.

they are not knowledge workers, at least not in the traditional sense. They are a new kind of animal, a type we call a

“smart creative,”

and they are the key to achieving success in the ...

Since the industrial revolution, operating processes have been biased toward lowering risk and avoiding mistakes. These processes, and the overall management approach from which they were derived,

result in environments that stifle smart creatives.

the defining characteristic of today’s successful companies is the ability to continually deliver great products. And the only way to do that is to attract smart creatives and creat...

A smart creative has deep technical knowledge in how to use the tools of her trade,21 and ple...

She is an expert in doing. She doesn’t just design concepts, she builds prototypes. She is analytically smart. She is comfortable with data and can use it to make decisions. She also understands its fallacies and is wary of endless analysis.

She is business smart. She sees a direct line from technical expertise to product excellence to business success, and understands the value of all three.

A smart creative is a firehose of new ideas that are genuinely new. Her perspective is different from yours or ours.

It’s even occasionally different from her own perspective, for a smart creative can play the perspective chameleon when she needs to.

She is always questioning, never satisfied with the status quo, seeing probl...

She doesn’t wait to be told what to do and sometimes ignores direction if she doesn’t agree with it.

She takes action based on her own initiative, which is considerable.

She freely collaborates, and judges ideas and analyses on their merits an...

they all must possess business savvy, technical knowledge, creative energy, and a hands-on approach to getting things done. Those are the fundamentals.

Perhaps the best thing about smart creatives is that they are everywhere.

Their common characteristic is that they work hard and are willing to question the status quo and attack things differently. This is why they can have such an impact.

It is also why they are uniquely difficult to manage, especially under old models, because

no matter how hard you try, you can’t tell people like ...

we had to do what so many business leaders are faced with today: reinvent our rules for management and create and maintain a new kind of work environment where our amazing smart-creative employees could thrive,

we ended up having to relearn everything we thought we knew about management,

how to attract the best smart creatives,

which starts with culture, because culture and success go hand in hand,

smart creatives are most attracted to ideas that are grounded in a strong strategic foundation.

business plans aren’t nearly as important as the pillars upon which they are built.

consensus

and how to get there.

communica...

which become vital (and harder) as the orga...

Innov...

is up next, since the only way to achieve sustained success is through continuous product excellence, and an environment of innovative primor...

how to imagine the uni...

None of this is easy, and many of our lessons we learned the hard way, through long meetings, contentious struggles, and errors.

Employees expect much more from their companies now, and they are often not getting it.

This is an opportunity:

The principles that we talk about apply to anyone who is trying to start a new venture or initiative, either from scratch or f...

This core insight—that ads should be placed based on their relevancy, not just how much the advertiser was willing to pay and the number of clicks they received—became the foundation upon which Google’s AdWords engine, and a multibillion-dollar business, was built.