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

by Laszlo Bock

They created BackRub, a reference to the backlinks reaching back from the site you saw to the site you had just been on. In August 1998, Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the cofounders of Sun Microsystems, famously wrote a $100,000 check to “Google, Inc.” before the company was even incorporated. Less well known is that they moments later received a second $100,000 check from Stanford professor David Cheriton, on whose porch they had met Andy.

Someone just gave them 200k. Wtf

The presence of a huge training budget is not evidence that you’re investing in your people. It’s evidence that you failed to hire the right people to begin with.

In 1998, Frank Schmidt and John Hunter published a meta-analysis of eighty-five years of research on how well assessments predict performance.85 They looked at nineteen different assessment techniques and found that typical, unstructured job interviews were pretty bad at predicting how someone would perform once hired. Unstructured interviews have an r2 of 0.14, meaning that they can explain only 14 percent of an employee’s performance.xxiii This is somewhat ahead of reference checks (explaining 7 percent of performance), ahead of the number of years of work experience (3 percent), and well ahead of “graphology,” or handwriting analysis (0.04 percent), which I’m stunned that anyone actually uses. Maybe some hospitals test the legibility of doctors’ handwriting. … The best predictor of how someone will perform in a job is a work sample test (29 percent).

work experience fil

Role-Related Knowledge. By far the least important attribute we screen for is whether someone actually knows anything about the job they are taking

and it also helps prevent cronyism, where managers hire their old buddies for their new teams.

If the Senior Leader Review is supportive, then Larry is sent each week’s recommended hires. The report includes links to the detailed hiring packets for every candidate as well as summaries about each candidate and the feedback and recommendations from each successive level of review. The most common feedback from Larry is that a candidate might not meet our hiring bar or that the creativity shown in a portfolio might not be up to snuff.

When I worked at GE, I knew a senior executive I’ll call Ellen. Ellen had fast-tracked through GE and been rewarded with a top job. One morning, Ellen breezed into her office and dropped a small paper bag on her secretary’s desk. “Lisa, can you run this to my doctor’s office? I have to give him a stool sample.” The bag contained a still-warm piece of Ellen’s morning production.

What managers miss is that every time they give up a little control, it creates a wonderful opportunity for their team to step up, while giving the manager herself more time for new challenges.

We deliberately set ambitious goals that we know we won’t be able to achieve in all cases. If you’re achieving all your goals, you’re not setting them aggressively enough.

As an employee, I want to be treated fairly. I don’t mind someone being paid more than me if they are contributing more. But if we’re doing the same work and they’re being paid way more, I’ll be mighty unhappy.

Never have the conversations at the same time. Annual reviews happen in November, and pay discussions happen a month later.

In fact, human performance in organizations follows a power law distribution for most jobs. Herman Aguinis and Ernest O’Boyle of Indiana University and the University of Iowa explain that “instead of a massive group of average performers dominating … through sheer numbers, a small group of elite performers [dominate] through massive performance.”

Every company has the seeds of its future success in its best people, yet most fail to study them closely. This is a missed opportunity, because as Groysberg demonstrates, high performance is highly context dependent. Benchmarking and best practices tell you what worked elsewhere, but not what will work for you.

An engineering manager who can’t code is not going to be able to lead a team at Google. But of the behaviors that differentiated the very best, technical input made the smallest difference to teams.

Reading this, I realized that management too is phenomenally complex. It’s a lot to ask of any leader to be a product visionary or a financial genius or a marketing wizard as well as an inspiring manager. But if we could reduce good management to a checklist, we wouldn’t need to invest millions of dollars in training, or try to convince people why one style of leadership is better than another. We wouldn’t have to change who they were. We could just change how they behave.

“Tiger, what are you doing out here hitting balls at three a.m.?” “It doesn’t rain very often in Northern California,” replied the kid who went on to become one of the most successful golfers in history. “It’s the only chance I have to practice hitting in the rain.” You might expect this kind of diligence from the best athlete in his field. What is fascinating is how narrow the exercise’s scope was. He wasn’t practicing putting or hitting from a sand bunker. He spent four hours standing in the rain, hitting the same shot from the same spot, pursuing perfection in an intensely specific skill. It turns out that’s the best way to learn. K. Anders Ericsson, a professor of psychology at Florida State University, has studied the acquisition of expert-level skill for decades. The conventional wisdom is that it takes ten thousand hours of effort to become an expert. Ericsson instead found that it’s not about how much time you spend learning, but rather how you spend that time. He finds evidence that people who attain mastery of a field, whether they are violinists, surgeons, athletes,144 or even spelling bee champions,145approach learning in a different way from the rest of us. They shard their activities into tiny actions, like hitting the same golf shot in the rain for hours, and repeat them relentlessly. Each time, they observe what happens, make minor—almost imperceptible—adjustments, and improve. Ericsson refers to this as deliberate practice: intentional repetitions of simil...

Miyagi was right. Wax on wax off.

As an experiment, in late 2013 I invited Googler Bill Duane, a former engineering leader turned Mindfulness Guru, to start my weekly staff meetings with the exercise. I wanted to experiment on ourselves first, and if it worked out we could then try it on larger groups of Googlers, and perhaps eventually the whole company.

Finally, it’s also important to reward failure. While incentives and goals matter, the act of considered risk-taking itself needs to be rewarded, especially in the face of failure. Otherwise, people simply won’t take risks.

“The biggest thing I learned [from working as a commercial fisherman when I was twenty-three] was that hard work doesn’t always pay off. If you work on the wrong thing, it doesn’t really matter how hard you work, because it’s not going to make a difference.”

Most of the programs we use to delight and care for Googlers are free, or very close to it.

People with tight social networks, like those in a business unit or team, often have similar ideas and ways of looking at problems. Over time, creativity dies. But the handful of people who operate in the overlapping space between groups tend to come up with better ideas. And often, they’re not even original. They are an application of an idea from one group to a new group.

[President Obama] said. ‘I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.’ He mentioned research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one’s ability to make further decisions. It’s why shopping is so exhausting. ‘You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.’”

Chefs shared that some Googlers had even thrown food at the café staff after being served.

And I shared a piece of anonymous feedback that a Googler had written: Stop trying to tell me how to live my life. If you don’t want to provide us the traditional food benefit then shut all the cafés down. … Seriously stop this sh** or I’ll go to Microsoft, Twitter or Facebook where they don’t f*** with us. The room froze.

You either believe people are fundamentally good or you don’t. If you do believe they’re good, then as an entrepreneur, team member, team leader, manager, or CEO, you should act in a way that’s consistent with your beliefs. If people are good, they should be free. Work is far less meaningful and pleasant than it needs to be because well-intentioned leaders don’t believe, on a primal level, that people are good. Organizations build immense bureaucracies to control their people. These control structures are an admission that people can’t be trusted. Or at best, they suggest that one’s baser nature can be controlled and channeled by some enlightened figure with the wisdom to know what is best. That the nature of man is bad, and must be forged through rules, rewards, and punishments.

I’ve had salespeople tell me “Bad breath is better than no breath,” meaning that they’d rather have the revenue that comes from a mediocre performer in a territory hitting 70 percent of their sales quota than have the territory empty.

The more specific you can be in slicing expertise, the easier it will be to study your stars and discern why they are more successful than others.

My father founded an engineering firm that he led for over three decades. He cared deeply for each of his people, paying them not just in wages but in kind words and advice and mentorship. And when any of his team reached five years in tenure, he took them aside for a private conversation. He told them that the company had a pension plan, and at five years they were fully vested in it. In addition to whatever they’d been saving, he had also been putting money aside for each of them. Some cheered, some cried, some simply thanked him. He didn’t tell people earlier than that because he didn’t want them to stay for the money. He wanted them to stay because they loved building things and loved the team. He was generous when it mattered most, and that made all the difference.

Remember that performance follows a power law distribution in most jobs, no matter what your HR department tells you.