How Google Works

by Eric Schmidt

changing the culture of an ongoing enterprise is extraordinarily difficult, but even more critical to success:

A stagnant, overly “corporate” culture is anathema to the ave...

It is important not to simply criticize the existing culture, which will just insult people,

but rather to draw a connection between business failures and how the culture may have played a hand in those situations.

Promote transparency and sharing of ideas across divisions. Open up everyone’s calendar so that employees can see what other employees are doing. Hold more company-wide meetings and encourage honest questions without reprisal.

And when you get those tough questions, answer them honestly and authentically.

Sometimes, when looking to redefine a culture, it can be useful to look at the original one.

while building on the legacy of that founder, don’t be afraid to scrap its obsolete trappings.

Practicing what we preach in this book in the effort to change a culture takes a lot more time than expected.

You will hire people who need to believe in you and your idea enough to be willing to make the same sacrifices.

To do all this, you have to be crazy enough to think you will succeed, but sane enough to make it happen.

This requires commitment, tenacity, and most of all, ...

Leadership requires passion. If you don’t have it, get out now.

The famous Google mantra of “Don’t be evil” is not entirely what it seems. Yes, it genuinely expresses a company value and aspiration that is deeply felt by employees.

But “Don’t be evil” is mainly another way to empower employees.

Googlers do regularly check their moral compass when ...

Every company needs a “Don’t be evil,” a cultural lodestar that shines over all management layers, product plans, and office politics.

At USAA, it was the mission: not a perfect one but the spirit of "serving those who serve us" was heartfelt and genuine

This is the ultimate value of having a well-established and well-understood company culture. It becomes the basis for everything you and the company do;

it is the safeguard against something going off the rails, because it is the rails. The best...

There will be failures, but there will be more cases where people overdeliver, and when that happens the bar gets set even higher.

That is the power of a great culture: It can make each member of the company better. And it can make the company ascendant.

MBA-style business plans, no matter how well conceived and thought out, are always flawed in some important way.

This is why a venture capitalist will always follow the maxim of investing in the team, not the plan.

Since the plan is wrong, the people have to be right. Successful teams spot the flaws in their plan and adjust.

it’s fine to have a plan, but understand that it will change as you progress and discover new things about the products and market.

This rapid iteration is critical to success, but equally important is the foundation upon which the plan is built.

although your plan might change, it needs to be based on a foundational set of principles that are grounded in how things work today

The plan is fluid, the foundation stable.

Some prospective team members may be turned off by this flexibility; most people...

Smart creatives, on the other hand, relish the “we’ll figure i...

today they stand as a foundational blueprint for how to create an Internet Century success story:

Bet on technical insights that help solve a big problem in a novel way, optimize for scale, not for revenue, and let great products grow the market for everyone.

Larry complained about the poor results he got when he used the “university” query with their product.

The fault was his, he was told. He should have been more precise with his query.

So Larry and Sergey discovered a...

Love this short and pithy ancedote!

Find a page that a lot of other pages point to, and you have probably found a page with higher-quality content.

Since then, most of Google’s successful products have been based on strong technical insights, while most of the less successful ones lacked them.

AdWords, the Google ads engine that generates most of the company’s revenue, was based on the insight that ads could be ranked and placed on a page based on their value as information to users, rather than just by who was willing to pay more.

Google News, the site that aggregates news headlines from thousands of media outlets, was based on the insight that we could algorithmica...

Chrome, Google’s open-source browser, was founded on the insight that as websites grew more complex and powerful, browsers n...

Pick an innovative, successful Google product, and you are likely to find at least one significant technical insight behind it, the sort of idea that c...

Product leaders create product plans, but those product plans

often (usually!) lack the most important component:

What is the technical insight upon which those new features, products, or p...

technical ...

is a new way of applying technology or design that either drives down the cost or increases the functions and usability of t...

The result is something that is better than the competition i...

The improvement is often obvious; it doesn’t take a lot of marketing for customers to figure out that this product i...

more often it’s hard, which is perhaps why most companies don’t make it a foundation of their strategy.