How Google Works

by Eric Schmidt

Part of the fun comes from inhaling the fumes of future success.

“When you are in a turnaround,” the man told him, “find the smart people first.

While establishing a culture in a start-up is relatively easy, 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 average smart creative.

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

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

(Eric was once asked at a company meeting what the Google dress code was. “You must wear something” was his answer.)

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, single-mindedness.

the CEO who picks up the stack of newspapers outside the front door, the founder who wipes the counters.

Mostly, though, they do it because they care so much about the company. Leadership requires passion. If you don’t have it, get out now.

venture capitalist will always follow the maxim of investing in the team, not the plan.

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.

A technical insight is a new way of applying technology or design that either drives down the cost or increases the functions and usability of the product by a significant factor.

You will never disrupt an industry or transform your business, and you’ll never get the best smart creatives on board, if your strategy is narrowly based on leveraging your competitive advantage to attack related markets.

market research can’t tell you about solving problems that customers can’t conceive are solvable.

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

The best products had achieved their success based on technical factors, not business ones, whereas the less stellar ones lacked technical distinction.

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

start with a solution to a narrow problem and look for ways to broaden its scope.

New technologies tend to come into the world in a very pr...

Even the Internet was initially conceived as a way for scientists and academics to share research. As smart as its creators were, they could never have imagined its future functionality

When you base your product strategy on technical insights, you avoid me-too products that simply deliver what customers are asking for.

(Henry Ford: “If I had listened to customers, I would have gone out looking for faster horses.”)

Basing products on technical insights seems like a fairly obvious approach, but it is a lot more difficult to practice than to preach.

“What is your technical insight?” turns out to be an easy question to ask and a hard one to answer.

Competition is much more intense and competitive advantages don’t last long, so you have to have a “grow big fast” strategy.

While financial analysts anguish over its profitability, Amazon always focuses on growth. Now it is one of the most disruptive forces in at least three different industries: retail, media, and computing.

the company could have followed the lead of every other commercial website and put ads on the home page. But it didn’t. Instead it invested in improving the search engine.

These companies assembled existing technology components in new ways to reimagine existing businesses.

we focused on search because it was something we felt we were better at than anyone else.

“no matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.”

Putting all your information online shows that there are no hidden agendas.

we have a team whose job it is to make it as easy as possible for users to leave us. We want to compete on a level playing field and win users’ loyalty based on merit.

If you focus on your competition, you will never deliver anything truly innovative.

Our job is to think of the thing you haven’t thought of yet that you really need.

The smart creatives matter more than the role; the company matters more than the manager.

Truth be told, some of our most effective colleagues are people we most definitely would not want to have a beer with.

You must work with people you don’t like, because a workforce comprised of people who are all “best office buddies” can be homogeneous, and homogeneity in an organization breeds failure.

Great talent often doesn’t look and act like you.

Hiring brilliant generalists is far better for the company.

If everyone knows someone great, why isn’t it everyone’s job to recruit that great person?

But the job of finding people belongs to everyone, and this fact needs to be woven into the fabric of the company.

The best interviews feel like intellectual discussions between friends

comfort with ambiguity, bias to action, and collaborative nature.

When people are right out of school, they tend to prioritize company first, then job, then industry. But at this point in their career that is exactly the wrong order.

listen for the people who truly get technology.

it is always a good idea for individuals to build expertise in areas that complement things that are getting cheap, and data, along with computing power to crunch it, is definitely getting cheap. We are in the era of big data, and big data needs statisticians to make sense of it. The democratization of data means that those who can analyze it well will win.

Data is the sword of the twenty-first century, those who wield it well, the samurai.

Business, regardless of size or scope, is forever, permanently global, while humans are naturally provincial.