How Google Works

by Eric Schmidt

“What’s different now?”

Organize around people CEOs whose impact is the highest

Luiz Barroso, talked about it in a smartly worded internal Google+ posting in late 2014 that was forwarded to us. He called it his Roofshot Manifesto (“We choose to go to the roof not because it is glamorous, but because it is right there!”),

“methodical, relentless, persistent pursuit of 1.3–2X opportunities,” which he called “roofshots.”

YouTube and its shift to focus on watch time as a metric rather than video views.

The math works: If you do something 1.3X every quarter, you’ll hit 10X within three years.

Luiz sums it up perfectly with this advice: “Go out there and have huge dreams, then show up to work the next morning and relentlessly incrementally achieve them.”

Just go talk to the engineers.”

Three powerful technology trends have converged to fundamentally shift the playing field in most industries. First, the Internet has made information free, copious, and ubiquitous—practically everything is online. Second, mobile devices and networks have made global reach and continuous connectivity widely available. And third, cloud computing13 has put practically infinite computing power and storage and a host of sophisticated tools and applications at everyone’s disposal,

The result of all this turmoil is that product excellence is now paramount to business success—not control of information, not a stranglehold on distribution, not overwhelming marketing power (although these are still important).

As Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, says: “In the old world, you devoted 30 percent of your time to building a great service and 70 percent of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.”

The basis for success then, and for continual product excellence, is speed.

“knowledge workers.” This is a label that management guru Peter Drucker first coined in 1959 in a book called Landmarks of Tomorrow.

The primary objective of any business today must be to increase the speed of the product development process and the quality of its output.

Not every smart creative has all of these characteristics, in fact very few of them do. But they all must possess business savvy, technical knowledge, creative energy, and a hands-on approach to getting things done. Those are the fundamentals.

“He who lives to see two or three generations is like a man who sits some time in the conjurer’s booth at a fair, and witnesses the performance twice or thrice in succession. The tricks were meant to be seen only once, and when they are no longer a novelty and cease to deceive, their effect is gone.”

John Wooden’s observation that “it’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.”

“query snippet term vector”),

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,

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?

General Electric CEO Jack Welch said in Winning: “No vision is worth the paper it’s printed on unless it is communicated constantly and reinforced with rewards.”

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.

“think outside the box” (which has to be the most inside-the-box phrase ever uttered),

Hippos are dangerous in companies too, where they take the form of the Highest-Paid Person’s Opinion.

“tenurocracies,” because power derives from tenure, not merit.

Jim Barksdale, erstwhile CEO of Netscape: “If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.”

For a meritocracy to work, it needs to engender a culture where there is an “obligation to dissent”.

You should never be able to reverse engineer a company’s organizational chart from the design of its product.

Once you identify the people who have the biggest impact, give them more to do. When you pile more responsibility on your best people, trust that they will keep taking it on or tell you when enough is enough. As the old saying goes: If you want something done, give it to a busy person.

famous knave Iago, warning the smart creative Othello to “beware, my lord, of jealousy. It is the green-eye’d monster, which doth mock the meat it feeds on.”

Tagging the wall of a nave? Knave.

(This is another argument for crowded offices: Humans are at their best when surrounded by social controls, and crowded offices have lots of social controls!)

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

Steve Jobs was one of the greatest business divas the world has ever known!)

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

Michael Hogan: “My first word of advice is this: Say yes. In fact, say yes as often as you can. Saying yes begins things. Saying yes is how things grow. Saying yes leads to new experiences, and new experiences will lead you to knowledge and wisdom…. An attitude of yes is how you will be able to go forward in these uncertain times.”

In October 2010, a couple of Google engineers named Colin McMillen52 and Jonathan Feinberg launched an internal site called Memegen, which lets Googlers create memes—pithy captions matched to images—and vote on each other’s creations.

When Israeli tank commanders head into combat, they don’t yell “Charge!” Rather, they rally their troops by shouting “Ah’cha’rye,” which translates from Hebrew as “Follow me.”

“pliancy to roll with the punches in this vertiginous environment.”60

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.

but the heart of the product’s advantage consisted of this single technical insight about using the web’s link structure as a roadmap to the best answer.

What is the technical insight upon which those new features, products, or platforms will be built?

Giving the customer what he wants is less important than giving him what he doesn’t yet know he wants.

And when we look back at other Google products that didn’t make it (iGoogle, Desktop, Notebook, Sidewiki, Knol, Health, even the popular Reader), they all either lacked underlying technical insights from the outset, or the insights upon which they were based became dated as the Internet evolved.

So one way of developing technical insights is to use some of these accessible technologies and data and apply them in an industry to solve an existing problem in a new way.

Find the geeks, find the stuff, and that’s where you’ll find the technical insights you need to drive success.

Another potential source of technical insights is to start with a solution to a narrow problem and look for ways to broaden its scope.

Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of porn, “I know it when I see Google it.”

“What is your technical insight?” turns out to be an easy question to ask and a hard one to answer. So for your products, ask the question. If you can’t articulate a good answer, rethink the product.

in the technology industry, companies always think “platforms, not products.”