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understand that they don’t have all the answers—exactly the type of smart-creative characteristics you want.
We are hiring for passion, remember,
Google interviews are a half hour. Most interviews will result in a no-hire decision,
Top performers get paid well in athletics, and they should in business too.
the best way to avoid having to fire underperformers is not to hire them.
Are there members of your team whom, if they told you they were leaving, you would not fight hard to keep? If there are employees you would let go, then perhaps you should.
“Life is like a sewer: What you get out of it depends on what you put into it”
If you’re not sure if a course of action is right, the best thing you can do is try it out and then correct course.
So a key skill to develop as the CEO or senior leader in a company is to know which decisions to make and which to let run their course without you.
Spend 80 percent of your time on 80 percent of your revenue.
Whenever you watch a world-class athlete perform, you can be sure that there is a great coach behind her success. It’s not that the coach is better at playing the sport than the player, in fact that is almost never the case. But the coaches have a different skill: They can observe players in action and tell them how to be better.
“Power comes not from knowledge kept but from knowledge shared.
“The essence of being human involves asking questions, not answering them.”
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.
“If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.”)
Innovation: It’s the next big thing.
If your customers are asking for it, you aren’t being innovative when you give them what they want; you are just being responsive.
For something to be innovative, it needs to be new, surprising, and radically useful.
“Innovative people do not need to be told to do it, they need to be allowed to do it.”
“focus on the user and all else will follow.”
If your OKRs are all green, you aren’t setting them high enough.
20/10 became our rule for resource allocation: 70 percent of resources dedicated to the core business, 20 percent on emerging, and 10 percent on new.
When you want to spur innovation, the worst thing you can do is overfund it.
that irrational tendency most humans have to count the amount of resources that have already been invested in a project as one of the reasons to continue to invest in the project (“We have already invested millions, we can’t stop now”).193 Too often, the tendency is to feed the losers in hopes of making them winners.
Invest only when they get some lift. Google’s Chrome is a great example of this—it
Figure out some way to let people experience the product, and use the data to make the product better.
To innovate, you must learn to fail well. Learn from your mistakes: Any failed project should yield valuable technical, user, and market insights that can help inform the next effort.
At Amazon we like things to work in five to seven years.
what could happen in your industry in the next five years. What could change most quickly, and what will not change at all?
