How Google Works

by Eric Schmidt

For something to be innovative, it needs to be new, surprising, and radically useful.

First, the idea has to be something that addresses a big challenge or opportunity,

Second, they have to have an idea for a solution that is radically different from anything currently in the market.

least feasible, and achievable in the not-too-distant future.

usually there’s a reason the market is empty: It’s not big enough to sustain a growing venture.

Remember, Google was late to the search-engine party, not early.

Udi’s job was to set up an innovation bureaucracy. That’s pretty much an oxymoron.

“Innovative people do not need to be told to do it, they need to be allowed to do it.”

innovation needs to be integrated into the fabric of the company, across every function and region. When you isolate it under a particular group, you may attract innovators to that group, but you won’t have enough first followers.

“Optimism is an essential ingredient for innovation. How else can the individual welcome change over security, adventure over staying in a safe place?”

find and attract those optimistic people, then give them the place to create change and adventure.

Focus on the user… and the money will follow.

At Google, our users are the people who use our products, while our customers are the companies that buy our advertising and license our technology.

There are rarely conflicts between the two, but when there are, our bias is toward the user. It has to be this way, regardless of your industry. Users are more empowered than ever, and won’t tolerate crummy products.

Just the thought process—How would I start over?—can spur ideas that were previously not considered.

thinking big is actually a very powerful tool for attracting and retaining smart creatives.

Thinking big is not only a very powerful recruiting and retention tool, it’s contagious.

as the company grows it becomes harder to accomplish stretch goals without teammates.

overinvesting in a new concept is just as problematic as underinvesting, since it can make it much harder to admit failure later on.

creativity loves constraints.

A lack of resources forces ingenuity.

When you want to spur innovation, the worst thing you can do is overfund it.

“The human race built most nobly when limitations were greatest.”

Twenty percent time is a check and balance on imperial managers, a way to give people permission to work on stuff they aren’t supposed to work on.

we have found that when you trust people with freedom, they generally do not waste it on extravagant pies in the sky.

Larry and Sergey, their response was typical: Why only this museum? Why not all museums? Why not create a product that helps all the archives in the world digitize their content?

There is a fine line to walk here, and we haven’t always gotten it right. The right criticism is motivating, but too much has the opposite effect.

feed the winners and starve the losers, regardless of prior investment.

To decide which efforts are winners and which are losers, use data.

To innovate, you must learn to fail well. Learn from your mistakes:

Most of the world’s great innovations started out with entirely different applications,

you are thinking big enough it is very hard to fail completely.

“It helps to see failure as a road and not a wall.”

“Good judgment comes from experience; experience comes from bad judgment.”

“Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue.

We say we’re stubborn on vision and flexible on details.”

Understanding what you do about the future, what do you see for the business that others may not, or may see but choose to ignore?

there are always hard questions, and they often don’t get asked because there aren’t any good answers

Microprocessors, mobile phones, and the Internet are all ubiquitous today, but virtually no one predicted that when they were in their incipient stages.

forgo conventional wisdom, crank up that imagination, and ask yourself what could happen in your industry in the next five years.

Do your customers love your products? Or are they locked in by other factors that might evaporate in the future?

Incumbents usually fail to understand how quickly they can be disrupted,

If data empirically show that a new way of doing things is better than the old way, then the role of government isn’t to prevent change but to allow the disruption to occur.

types of data are being collected that simply have never been available before, at a scale that was the stuff of science fiction only a few years ago.

Infinite data and infinite computing power create an amazing playground for the world’s smart creatives to solve big problems.

Fusion Tables, which is designed to “bust your data out of its silo” by allowing related data sets to be merged and analyzed as a single set,

seems like a bad thing when you are being disrupted, since it is all upon you so quickly. But

when you are building new ventures, the acceleration of everything works in your favor.

Computers push humans to get even better, and humans then program even smarter computers.

smart creative A person who combines deep technical knowledge of his or her trade with intelligence, business savvy, and a host of creative qualities.