How Google Works

by Eric Schmidt

She is analytically smart. She is comfortable with data and can use it to make decisions. She also understands its fallacies and is wary of endless analysis. Let data decide, she believes, but don’t let it take over. She is business smart. She sees a direct line from technical expertise to product excellence to business success, and understands the value of all three. She is competitive smart. Her stock-in-trade starts with innovation, but it also includes a lot of work. She is driven to be great, and that doesn’t happen 9-to-5. She is user smart. No matter the industry, she understands her product from the user or consumer’s perspective better than almost anyone. We call her a “power user,” not just casual but almost obsessive in her interest. She is the automotive designer who spends her weekends fixing up that ’69 GTO, the architect who can’t stop redesigning her house. She is her own focus group, alpha tester, and guinea pig. A smart creative is a firehose of new ideas that are genuinely new. Her perspective is different from yours or ours. It’s even occasionally different from her own perspective, for a smart creative can play the perspective chameleon when she needs to. She is curious creative. She is always questioning, never satisfied with the status quo, seeing problems to solve everywhere and thinking that she is just the person to solve them. She can be overbearing. She is risky creative. She is not afraid to fail, because she believes that in failure there is u...