How Google Works

by Eric Schmidt

“There is no such thing as a minor lapse ...

Fortunately, employee behavior is socia...

In a healthy culture of knightish values, the knights will call out the knaves for their poor behavior until...

As a manager, if you detect a knave in your midst it’s best to reduce his responsibility and appoint a knight to assume it. And for more egregious offenses, you need to get rid of the knave, quickly.

You must always be firm with the people who violate the basic interests of the company.

There are tipping points in knave density. It approaches a critical mass—which is smaller than you think48—and people start to believe they need to be knave-like to succeed, which only exacerbates the problem.

Smart creatives may have a lot of good traits, but they aren’t saints, so it’s important to watch your knave quotient.

Knavish behavior is a product of l...

diva-ish behavior is one of high ex...

as long as their contributions match their outlandish egos, divas should be tolerated and even protected.

Great people are often unusual and difficult, and some of those quirks can be quite off-putting.

Since culture is about social norms and divas refuse to be normal, cultural factors can conspire to sweep out ...

As long as people can figure out any way to work with the divas, and the divas’ achievements outweigh the collateral ...

you should fight ...

They will pay off your investment by doing int...

For many people, work is an important part of life, not something to be separated.

The best cultures invite and enable people to be overworked in a good way, with too many interesting things to do both at work and at home.

So if you are a manager, it’s your responsibility to keep the work part lively and full; it’s not a key component of your job to ensure that employee...

There are times when work overwhelms everything and they have to make sacrifices, and they accept that.

But there are also those times when they sneak away for an afternoon to take the kids to the beach

Manage this by giving people responsibility and freedom.

burnout isn’t caused by working too hard, but by resentment at having to give up what really matters to you.

Give your smart creatives control, and they will usually make their own best decisions about how to balance their lives.

In small teams, teammates are more apt to sense when one member is burning out and needs to go home early or take a vacation.

A big team may think someone who takes a vacation is slacking off; a small team is happy to see that empty seat.

We encourage people to take rea...

If someone is so critical to the company’s success that he believes he can’t unplug for a week or two without things crashing down, then there is...

No one should or can be ind...

Companies come up with elaborate, often passive-aggressive ways to say no: processes to follow, approvals to get, meetings to attend.

No is like a tiny death to smart creatives. No is a signal that the company has lost its start-up verve, that it’s too corporate.

Enough no’s, and smart creatives stop asking and start he...

Growing companies spawn chaos, which most managers try to control by cr...

While some of these processes may be necessary to help the company scale, they should be dela...

Set the bar high for that new process or approval gate; make sure there are very compelling business ...

if you’re working your butt off without deriving any enjoyment, something’s probably wrong.

a lot of it comes from laughing and joking and enjoying the company of your coworkers.

Most companies try to manufacture Fun, wi...

There’s a problem with these Fun events: They aren’t fun. This doesn’t have to be the case.

There’s nothing wrong with organized company events, as long as they are done with flair. In fact, it’s not hard to throw a fun company party.

Here’s our idea for off-sites: Forget “team building” and have fun.

providing an experience that people couldn’t or wouldn’t have on their own.

These events don’t cost much—fun can be cheap

When you’re a leader, everyone is watching, so it doesn’t matter that you dance poorly, it matters that you dance.)

A defining mark of a fun culture is identical to that of an innovative one: The fun comes from everywhere.

The key is to set the boundaries of what is permissible as broadly as possible.

Nothing can be...

This isn’t Fun—it couldn’t possibly be created by fiat.

It’s fun, and can only occur in a permissive environment that trusts its employees

It’s impossible to have too much of that kind of fun. The more you have, the more you get done.

Quite interesting to compare this with the Wired article discussing the last 3 years of "hell" at Google under Sundar Pichai. Could Google's later culture problrms have been avoided or was it inevitable to occur given the scale they ultimately achieved?

While establishing a culture in a start-up is relatively easy,