By the time we delivered that business plan to the board back in 2003, we knew that we had to do what so many business leaders are faced with today: reinvent our rules for management and create and maintain a new kind of work environment where our amazing smart-creative employees could thrive, in our case in a company growing by leaps and bounds. While we were brought into Google to provide “adult supervision,” to succeed we ended up having to relearn everything we thought we knew about management, and our best teachers were the people who surrounded us every day at the Googleplex.
