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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Laszlo Bock
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October 9 - October 23, 2021
All it takes is a belief that people are fundamentally good—and enough courage to treat your people like owners instead of machines.
If you give people freedom, they will amaze you
At our weekly TGIF all-hands meeting, Larry and Sergey host the entire company (thousands join in person and by video, and tens of thousands watch the rebroadcast online) for updates from the prior week, product demonstrations, welcoming of new hires, and most important, thirty minutes of fielding questions from anyone in the company, on any topic.
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.
One of the serendipitous benefits of transparency is that simply by sharing data, performance improves.
if you write a nasty email about someone, you shouldn’t be surprised if they are added to the email thread.
Openness demonstrates to your employees that you believe they are trustworthy and have good judgment.
Either you believe people are good and you welcome their input, or you don’t.
We think we are hiring the best because, after all, aren’t we great judges of character?
In addition to thinking we’re superior interviewers, we convince ourselves that the candidate we select is also above average.
“A top-notch engineer is worth three hundred times or more than an average engineer. … I’d rather lose an entire incoming class of engineering graduates than one exceptional technologist.” 75
To Jeff Dean, “NP”xii means “No Problemo.”
“Only hire people who are better than you.”
Hiring is the most important people function you have, and most of us aren’t as good at it as we think.
But in 2010, our analyses revealed that academic performance didn’t predict job performance beyond the first two or three years after college, so we stopped requiring grades and transcripts except from recent graduates.
so selecting the individual search consultants you work with is more crucial than selecting the company.
In other words, most interviews are a waste of time because 99.4 percent of the time is spent trying to confirm whatever impression the interviewer formed in the first ten seconds.
The first step to mass empowerment is making it safe for people to speak up.
Make decisions based on data, not based on managers’ opinions
The mistake leaders make is that they manage too much.
The major problem with performance management systems today is that they have become substitutes for the vital act of actually managing people.
Most organizations undervalue and underreward their best people, without even knowing they are doing it.
Engineers generally think managers are at best a necessary evil, but mainly they get in the way, create bureaucracy, and screw things up.
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.
“A great lathe operator commands several times the wage of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer.”
The only reason your organization or places like GE have normal performance rating distributions is because HR and management force them to look that way.
… But creativity is an import-export game. It’s not a creation game.
We believe we know ourselves, and that certainty is part of the problem.
“Performance management” didn’t work because, regardless of their conduct, each person’s overall output was quite good.
A newly hired person actually destroys value.
No one physically dies of bad management (though perhaps one’s soul does, a little bit).
Another challenge we had was that Googlers would often sign up for learning courses and then fail to attend.
Doctors typically end up with more savings than baristas, for example.
Fifty-eight percent of the comments across six microkitchen-based studies were supportive of more healthy food only if it was in addition to existing offerings.
Jonathan Rosenberg once told me, “A crisis is an opportunity to have impact. Drop everything and deal with the crisis.”
Innovation thrives on creativity and experimentation, but it also requires thoughtful pruning.
Not every problem can be resolved with data. Reasonable people can look at the same set of facts and disagree, particularly where values are concerned.
And sparking a debate should never be a crime.
You either believe people are fundamentally good or you don’t.
If people are good, they should be free.
the most talented people on the planet will want to be part of a freedom-driven company.
Whatever you’re doing, it matters to someone. And it should matter to you.
Remember that performance follows a power law distribution in most jobs, no matter what your HR department tells you.
In contrast, “operations” was viewed by engineers as a credible title, connoting some actual ability to get things done.
