How Google Works

by Eric Schmidt

People stop thinking and instead just depend on the process to make decisions for them.

A new venture within a big company won’t be able to move the bottom line enough, so the tendency is to say, “Why bother?”

None of this stuff about giving people air cover and organizing around CEOs works if you don’t get the product right.

Many proposed deals never get to that point, which means that the company leaders never get to have a discussion about whether or not the target company is doing something interesting.

we are willing to spend precious management time debating a broad pipeline of deals.

Not-invented-here attitudes are a real danger in big companies; you need to have leaders who are OK with acknowledging the limitations (or outright failure) of internal efforts in light of the success of outside ones.

takes humility to make deals like this, which is exactly what our M&A process is designed to engender.

just as potentially damaging trend: The new ventures were drawing attention away from the core.

We have long felt that the start-up model, with small, autonomous teams located in one office led by passionate founders, is the most effective way to achieve remarkable new things

think-big-act-small concept

The ethos is always to build the prototype as cheaply as possible, and to worry about scaling only after the prototype fails to fail.

they frequently engage the engineers in deep design discussions.

It also helps bring a different, bigger perspective to these decisions.

Luiz correctly called out the “over-glamorization” of the moonshot 10X dogma at the expense of the very real accomplishments of “methodical, relentless, persistent pursuit of 1.3–2X opportunities,” which he called “roofshots.”

Moonshots can fail, and a lot of hard work can get put aside and never see the light of day. This rarely happens with roofshots.

everyone can work on roofshots, driven by 10X goals but working on 2X ideas.

“Go out there and have huge dreams, then show up to work the next morning and relentlessly incrementally achieve them.”

Think of any situation where lots of data is available and there are complex problems to be solved.

They felt that attracting and leading the very best engineers was the only way for Google to thrive and achieve its lofty ambitions.

the rules to guide us in this endeavor did not even exist yet, and they certainly couldn’t be found in the type of traditional business plan

offer higher-quality services and make those services easily accessible.

basically the way to challenge Microsoft, we said, was to create great products.

We worked incessantly to make search better. We added images, books, YouTube, shopping data, and any other corpus of information we could find.

One of the biggest reasons for our success, though, is that the plan we delivered to the board that day in 2003 wasn’t much of a plan at all.

When it came to management tactics, the only thing we could say for sure back then was that much of what the two of us had learned in the twentieth century was wrong, and that it was time to start over.

data used to be scarce and computing resources precious; today both are abundant,

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

The steps build and depend on each other, but none of them is ever completed and all of them are dynamic.

culture and success go hand in hand, and if you don’t believe your own slogans you won’t get very far.

None of this is easy, and many of our lessons we learned the hard way, through long meetings, contentious struggles, and errors. We also humbly acknowledge our great luck in having joined a spectacular company, run by brilliant founders, at the unique moment in history when the Internet was taking off.

As Peter Drucker pointed out, the Egyptian who conceived and built the pyramids thousands of years ago was really just a very successful manager.24 The Internet Century brims with pyramids yet unbuilt.

Jeff and gang had a clear understanding of their company’s priorities, and knew they had the freedom to try to solve any big problem that stood in the way of success.

Most companies neglect this. They become successful, and then decide they need to document their culture.

Offices should be designed to maximize energy and interactions, not for isolation and status.

a product manager’s job is to work together with the people who design, engineer, and develop things to make great products.

dissenting views, particularly in a public forum. That’s why dissent must be an obligation, not an option.

Small teams get more done than big ones,

a leader who doesn’t need him.

Once you identify the people who have the biggest impact, give them more to do.

Nice humble engineers have a way of becoming insufferable when they think they are the sole inventors of the world’s next big thing.

The character of a company is the sum of the characters of its people,

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.

Knaves are not to be confused with divas.

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.

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

it’s your responsibility to keep the work part lively and full; it’s not a key component of your job to ensure that employees consistently have a forty-hour workweek.

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.

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