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

by Laszlo Bock

You spend more time working than doing anything else in life.1

People mattered to Jack Welch, GE’s chairman and CEO from 1981 to 2001. He spent more than 50 percent of his time on people issues,

Google is the most sought-after place to work on the planet according to LinkedIn,5 and we receive more than two million applications every year, representing individuals from every background and part of the world. Of these, Google hires only several thousand per year,6making Google twenty-five times more selective than Harvard,7Yale,8 or Princeton.

This book is the story of how we think about our people, what we’ve learned over the past fifteen years, and what you can do to put people first and transform how you live and lead.

Why Google’s Rules Will Work for You

The surprising (and surprisingly successful) places that ...

Ishan elaborated how this happens: “When employees trust the leadership, they become brand ambassadors and in turn cause progressive change in their families, society, and environment. The return on investment to business is automatic, with greater productivity, business growth, and inspired customers.

We deliberately take power and authority over employees away from managers. Here is a sample of the decisions managers at Google cannot make unilaterally: Whom to hire Whom to fire How someone’s performance is rated How much of a salary increase, bonus, or stock grant to give someone

Who is selected to win an award for great management Whom to promote When code is of sufficient quality to be incorporated into our software code base The final design of a product and when to launch it

If you’re solving for what is most fair across the entire organization, which in turn helps employees have greater trust in the company and makes rewards more meaningful, managers

must give up this power and allow outcomes to be calibrated across groups.

The only thing that’s left. “Managers serve the team,”

the default leadership style at Google is one where a manager focuses not on punishments or rewards but on clearing roadblocks and inspiring her team.

The irony is that the best way to arrive at the beating heart of great management is to strip away all the tools on which managers most rely.

Performance improved only when companies implemented programs to empower employees (for example, by taking decision-making authority away from managers and giving it to individuals or teams), provided learning opportunities that were outside what people needed to do their jobs, increased their reliance on teamwork (by giving teams more autonomy and allowing them to self-organize), or a combination of these.

People spend most of their lives at work, but work is a grinding experience for most—a means to an end. It doesn’t have to be. We don’t have all the answers, but we have made some fascinating discoveries about how best to find, grow, and keep people in an environment of freedom, creativity, and play.

1 ................ Becoming a Founder

Reluctant to leave Stanford to start a company, Larry and Sergey tried to sell Google but were unable to. They

offered it to AltaVista for $1 million. No luck. They turned to Excite and at the urging of Vinod Khosla, a partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, lowered the price to $750,000. Excite passed.

Upon becoming president, Kelly took an unorthodox approach to management. First, he upended the physical design of their Murray Hill, New Jersey, labs. Rather than a traditional layout with each floor segregated into sections for each specialized area of research, Kelly insisted on a floor plan that forced interaction across departments: Offices were along long corridors spanning the entire floor, so that walking down the hall all but guaranteed that colleagues would stumble over each other and be drawn into one another’s work. Second, Kelly built Franken-teams, combining “thinkers and doers” as well as disparate experts on single teams. Author Jon Gertner described one such team in his history of Bell Labs, The Idea Factory:32 “Purposefully mixed together on the transistor project were physicists, metallurgists and electrical engineers; side by side were specialists in theory, experimentation and manufacturing.”

Third, Kelly gave people freedom. Gertner continues: Mr. Kelly believed that freedom was crucial, especially in research. Some of his scientists had so much autonomy that he was mostly unaware of their progress until years after he authorized their work. When he set up the team of researchers to work on what became the transistor,

What I love about his story is that Kelly acted like a founder. Like an owner.

he cared about the kind of place it was. He

People with vision were given the opportunity to

create their own Google.

You are a founder

being a founder doesn’t mean starting a new company.

The Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy wrote, “All happy families resemble one another.”v All successful organizations resemble one another as well. They possess a shared sense not just of what they produce, but of who they are and want to be.

My job as a leader is to make sure

everybody in the company has great opportunities, and that they feel they’re having a meaningful impact and are contributing to the good of society.

2 ................ “Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast” If you give people freedom, they will amaze you

Ed Schein, now retired from the MIT School of Management, taught that a group’s culture can be studied in three ways: by looking at its “artifacts,” such as physical space and behaviors; by surveying the beliefs and values espoused by group members; or by digging deeper into the underlying assumptions behind those values.37 It’s

A mission that matters

Our mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”40

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

The broad scope of our mission allows Google to move forward by steering with a compass rather than a speedometer.

The most talented people on the planet want an aspiration that is also inspiring. The challenge for leaders is to craft such a goal.

Having workers meet the people they are helping is the greatest motivator, even if they only meet for a few minutes.

We all want our work to matter. Nothing is a more powerful motivator than to know that you are making a difference in the world.

If you believe people are good, you must be unafraid to share information with them Transparency is the second cornerstone of our culture. “Default to open” is a phrase sometimes heard in the open-source technology community.

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

All of us want control over our destinies

Voice means giving employees a real say in how the company is run.

In 2009, Googlers told us through our annual survey that it was becoming harder to get things done. They were right. We had doubled in size, growing to 20,222 employees by the end of 2008 from 10,674 at the end of 2006, and growing to $21.8 billion in revenues from $10.6 billion. But rather than announcing top-down corporate initiatives, our CFO, Patrick Pichette, put the power in Googlers’ hands. 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: The calendar application didn’t allow groups to be added, so large meetings took forever to set up; budget approval thresholds were annoyingly low, requiring managers to review even the smallest transactions; time-saving tools were too hard to find (ironic). We implemented the changes Googlers asked for, they were happier, and it actually became easier to do our work.

Culture matters most when it is tested

If you give people freedom, they will amaze you

3 ................ Lake Wobegon, Where All the New Hires Are Above Average Why hiring is the single most important people activity in any organization

At Google, we front-load our people investment. This means the majority of our time and money spent on people is invested in attracting, assessing, and cultivating new hires. We spend more than twice as much on recruiting, as a percentage of our people budget, as an average company. If we are better able to select people up front, that means we have less work to do with them once they are hired.

Why did we decide to front-load our people investment by focusing on an unorthodox approach to hiring? We had no choice. Google started with two guys in a dorm room, in a crowded market where users could abandon us for competitors with just a single mouse click. Since the beginning, we knew that the only way to compete would be to have the most accurate, fastest search product in the world, but thought we would never have enough engineers to build what we needed: Web crawlers to identify and categorize everything on the Internet, algorithms to sift meaning from what was out there, tools to translate more than eighty languages, tests to make sure everything actually worked, data centers to host and serve all this data, and eventually hundreds of other products that needed development and support. Our greatest single constraint on growth has always, always been our ability to find great people.

The first change is to hire more slowly.