Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

by Laszlo Bock

Instead, it’s taken to be self-evident that organizing information and making it accessible ...

This kind of mission gives individuals’ work meaning, because it is a moral rather than a business goal. The most powerful movements ...

whether they were quests for independence o...

there’s a reason that revolutions tend to be about ideas and not pro...

Crucially, we can never achieve our mission, as there will always be more information to organize and...

Google’s map products form a platform that more than one million sites and app developers have used to build businesses,

A more traditional mission of creating value for customers or growing profits would never have led us to Street View. And it’s a far cry from counting backlinks in order to rank websites.

But our broader mission provided the space for Googlers and others to create wonderful things.

Having workers meet the people they are helping is the greatest motivator,

even if they only meet for a few minutes. It imbues one’s work with a significance that transcends careerism or money.

Deep down, every human being wants to find meaning in...

people see their work as

just a job

a c...

or a c...

it’s all in how you think about it.

Amy looked at doctors and nurses, teachers and librarians, engineers and analysts, managers and secretaries.

Across each of these, roughly one-third of people viewed their work as a calling. And people who did so were not just happier, b...

Transparency is the second cornerstone of our culture.

In open source, it’s countercultural to hide information.”

The benefit of so much openness is that everyone in the company knows what’s going on.

This may sound trivial, but it’s not.

Large organizations often have groups doing redundant work without knowing...

Information sharing allows everyone to understand the differences in goals across different group...

why we allow this competition to persist. Often it’s to take advantage of

“late binding,”

a corruption of a programming term that we use to indicate that it can be valuable to...

We also use an unfortunately named technique common in technology firms called

“dogfooding,”

where Googlers are the first to try new products and ...

One of the serendipitous benefits of transparency is that simply by sharing data, performance improves.

there are degrees of transparency, of defaulting to open.

Most organizations are so far from risk in this area that they have little to lose, and much to gain.

Openness demonstrates to your employees that you believe they are trustworthy and have good judgment. And giving them more context about what is happening (and how and why) will enable them to do their jobs more effectively and contribute in ways a top-down manager couldn’t anticipate.

Voice is the third cornerstone of Google’s culture.

Voice means giving employees a real say in how the company is run. Either you believe people are good and you welcome their input, or you don’t.

For many organizations this is terrifying, but it is the only way to live in a...

He launched Bureaucracy Busters, a now-annual program where Googlers identify their biggest frustrations and help fix them. In the first round, Googlers submitted 570 ideas and voted more than 55,000 times.

Most of the frustrations came from small, readily addressable issues:

These three cultural cornerstones—mission, transparency, voice—were at the forefront of our 2010 discussions of how Google should operate in China.

How could we be true to our values of transparency and voice if we censored our results?

we consistently made decisions based not on economics, but on what supported our values.

Time and again, we’ve let our cultural cornerstones of mission, transparency, and voice anchor us in tackling difficult and divisive issues, debating them, and resolving them into clear strategies:

Our culture was shaping our strategy, and not the ...

If you embark down this path, the road will be bumpy. Culture isn’t static.

every point in Google’s history, there has been a sense that the culture was degrading. Almost every Googler longs for the halcyon days of Google’s youth… which they tend to define as what Google was like in their first few months.

This is a reflection of both how wonderfully inspiring the first few months at Google can be and how quickly Google continues to evolve.

We enjoy a constant paranoia about losing the culture, and a constant, creeping sense of dissatisfaction with the current culture. This is a good sign! This feeling of teetering on the brink of losing our culture causes people to be vigilant ...

One way to address this worry is to be open to the discussion and to channel any frustration into ef...

Once you’ve chosen to think and act like a founder, your next decision is about what kind of culture you want to create. What are the beliefs you have about people, and do you have the courage to treat people the way your beliefs suggest?