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“In the old world, you devoted 30 percent of your time to building a great service and 70 percent of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.”19
Product development has become a faster, more flexible process, where radically better products don’t stand on the shoulders of giants, but on the shoulders of lots of iterations. The basis for success then, and for continual product excellence, is speed.
They get bored easily and shift jobs a lot.
The primary objective of any business today must be to increase the speed of the product development process and the quality of its output.
is also why they are uniquely difficult to manage, especially under old models, because no matter how hard you try, you can’t tell people like that how to think. If you can’t tell someone how to think, then you have to learn to manage the environment where they think. And make it a place where they want to come every day.
“He who lives to see two or three generations is like a man who sits some time in the conjurer’s booth at a fair, and witnesses the performance twice or thrice in succession. The tricks were meant to be seen only once, and when they are no longer a novelty and cease to deceive, their effect is gone.”
“it’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.”23
So just because you don’t have a hoodie and a seven-figure check from a venture capitalist, that doesn’t mean you can’t create the next big thing. All you need is the insight that your industry is transforming at a rapid pace, the guts to take a risk and be part of that transformation, and the willingness and ability to attract the best smart creatives and lead them to make it happen.
Smart creatives, though, place culture at the top of the list. To be effective, they need to care about the place they work. This is why, when starting a new company or initiative, culture is the most important thing to consider.
“No vision is worth the paper it’s printed on unless it is communicated constantly and reinforced with rewards.”
Offices should be designed to maximize energy and interactions, not for isolation and status.
“think outside the box” (which has to be the most inside-the-box phrase ever uttered),
Messiness is not an objective in itself (if it was, we know some teens who would be great hires), but since it is a frequent by-product of self-expression and innovation, it’s usually a good sign.37 And squashing it, which we’ve seen in so many companies, can have a surprisingly powerful negative effect. It’s OK to let your office be one hot mess.
We’ve worked at other companies with a rule of seven, but in all of those cases the rule meant that managers were allowed a maximum of seven direct reports. The Google version suggests that managers have a minimum of seven direct reports
“Your title makes you a manager. Your people make you a leader.”
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.
Smart creatives may have a lot of good traits, but they aren’t saints, so it’s important to watch your knave quotient.
(And if you have been reading this paragraph thinking “she” every time we mention diva, remember that Steve Jobs was one of the greatest business divas the world has ever known!)
For many people, work is an important part of life, not something to be separated.
Marissa Mayer, who became one of Silicon Valley’s most famous working mothers not long after she took over as Yahoo’s CEO in 2012, says that burnout isn’t caused by working too hard, but by resentment at having to give up what really matters to you.49
The “Just Say No” syndrome can creep into the workplace too. Companies come up with elaborate, often passive-aggressive ways to say no: processes to follow, approvals to get, meetings to attend. No is like a tiny death to smart creatives. No is a signal that the company has lost its start-up verve, that it’s too corporate. Enough no’s, and smart creatives stop asking and start heading to the exits.
“When you are in a turnaround,” the man told him, “find the smart people first. And to find the smart people, find one of them.”
(Eric was once asked at a company meeting what the Google dress code was. “You must wear something” was his answer.)
Every company needs a “Don’t be evil,” a cultural lodestar that shines over all management layers, product plans, and office politics.
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.
A technical insight is a new way of applying technology or design that either drives down the cost or increases the functions and usability of the product by a significant factor.
Giving the customer what he wants is less important than giving him what he doesn’t yet know he wants.
Don Tapscott put it well in Wikinomics, when he wrote that “the Internet has caused transaction costs to plunge so steeply that it has become much more useful to read Coase’s law, in effect, backward: Nowadays firms should shrink until the cost of performing a transaction internally no longer exceeds the cost of performing it externally.”74 Most companies have taken this approach purely for operational and cost-cutting reasons: They save money by outsourcing jobs to lower-wage markets. But they miss an important point. In the Internet Century, the objective of creating networks is not just to
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“no matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.”
If someone is truly passionate about something, they’ll do it for a long time even if they aren’t at first successful. Failure is often part of the deal.
Of course smart people know a lot and can therefore accomplish more than others less gifted. But hire them not for the knowledge they possess, but for the things they don’t yet know.
Favoring specialization over intelligence is exactly wrong, especially in high tech.
Supercomputer pioneer Seymour Cray used to deliberately hire for inexperience because it brought him people who “do not usually know what’s supposed to be impossible.”
At a certain size, however—in our experience the number is around five hundred employees—managers start worrying about headcount allocation more than about whom they’re going to get to fill those allocations. You hear about “fighting for headcount” a lot more than “finding great people,” because the latter is what those recruiters are for, right?
We are hiring for passion, remember, and passionate people will often have an exuberant online presence. This demonstrates a love of the digital medium, an important characteristic in today’s world.
after four interviews the incremental cost of conducting additional interviews outweighs the value the additional feedback contributes to the ultimate hiring decision.
The urgency of the role isn’t sufficiently important to compromise quality in hiring.
“It is the ultimate luxury to combine passion and contribution. It’s also a very clear path to happiness.”
There is a mistake technical and scientific people make. We think that if we have made a clever and thoughtful argument, based on data and smart analysis, then people will change their minds. This isn’t true. If you want to change people’s behavior, you need to touch their hearts, not just win the argument. We call this the Oprah Winfrey rule. (It
The highlights are easy, but when you ask a team for a list of lowlights, you often get a sugarcoated version of the truth: “Here’s the problem but it’s not all that bad and we already have a solution in the works.”
As business managers, we like to manage things. Want something done? Then put someone in charge of it. But innovation stubbornly resists traditional, MBA-style management tactics.
God created Earth’s primordial ooze; He didn’t delegate the task.
real artists ship.”
“Good judgment comes from experience; experience comes from bad judgment.”
In a lot of these incumbent businesses, technology is that interesting thing run by that slightly odd group in the other building; it isn’t something that anchors the CEO’s agenda every week.
Computers push humans to get even better, and humans then program even smarter computers.
