How Google Works

by Eric Schmidt

“Have you ever seen a scheduled plan that the team beat?” he asked. Um, no. “Have your teams ever delivered better products than what was in the plan?” No again. “Then what’s the point of the plan? It’s holding us back.

small team of engineers, developers, and designers can create fabulous products and distribute them online globally for free. It’s ridiculously easy to imagine and create a new product, try it out with a limited set of consumers, measure precisely what works and what doesn’t, iterate the product, and try again. Or throw it out and start over, that much smarter for the experience.

“it’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.”

the CEO, seeing a bad product, would call the person in charge of the product. There would be a meeting or two or three to discuss the problem, review potential solutions, and decide on a course of action. A plan would come together to implement the solution. Then, after a fair amount of quality assurance testing, the solution would launch. In a normal company, this would take several weeks. This isn’t what Larry did. Instead, he printed out the pages containing the results he didn’t like, highlighted the offending ads, posted them on a bulletin board on the wall of the kitchen by the pool table, and wrote THESE ADS SUCK in big letters across the top. Then he went home. He didn’t call or email anyone. He didn’t schedule an emergency meeting. He didn’t mention the issue to either of us. At 5:05 a.m. the following Monday, one of our search engineers, Jeff Dean, sent out an email. He and a few colleagues (including Georges Harik, Ben Gomes, Noam Shazeer, and Olcan Sercinoglu) had seen Larry’s note on the wall and agreed with Larry’s assessment of the ads’ relative suckiness. But the email didn’t just concur with the founder and add some facile bromide about looking into the problem. Rather, it included a detailed analysis of why the problem was occurring, described a solution, included a link to a prototype implementation of the solution the five had coded over the weekend, and provided sample results that demonstrated how the new prototype was an improvement over the then-cu...

Once you identify the people who have the biggest impact, give them more to do. When you pile more responsibility on your best people, trust that they will keep taking it on or tell you when enough is enough. As the old saying goes: If you want something done, give it to a busy person.

(Eric was once asked at a company meeting what the Google dress code was. “You must wear something” was his answer.)

Bet on technical insights that help solve a big problem in a novel way, optimize for scale, not for revenue, and let great products grow the market for everyone.

(Henry Ford: “If I had listened to customers, I would have gone out looking for faster horses.”)