Work Rules! Quotes

“You can’t understand Google … unless you know that both Larry and Sergey were Montessori kids.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“And offering higher wages just means you get more applicants, not that you get better applicants or can better sift the great from the mediocre.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“It’s almost impossibly difficult to take an average performer and through training turn them into a superstar.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“We all want our work to matter. Nothing is a more powerful motivator than to know that you are making a difference in the world. Amy Wrzesniewski of Yale University told me people see their work as just a job (“a necessity that’s not a major positive in their lives”), a career (something to “win” or “advance”), or a calling (“a source of enjoyment and fulfillment where you’re doing socially useful work”).”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“One day your team will have an origin story, a founding myth, just like Rome or Oprah or Google. Think about what you want it to be, about what you want to stand for. Think about what stories people will tell about you, your work, your team. Today you have the opportunity to become the architect of that story. To choose whether you want to be a founder or an employee. I know which I’d choose.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“One day your team will have an origin story, a founding myth, just like Rome or Oprah or Google. Think about what you want it to be, about what you want to stand for. Think about what stories people will tell about you, your work, your team. Today you have the opportunity to become the architect of that story. To choose whether you want to be a founder or an employee.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, he saw a missed call from Jeff Dean.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“The kind of workman who gives the business the best that is in him is the best kind of workman a business can have. And he cannot be expected to do this indefinitely without proper recognition.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“At Google, we front-load our people investment. This means the majority of our time and money spent on people is invested in attracting, assessing, and cultivating new hires. We spend more than twice as much on recruiting, as a percentage of our people budget, as an average company. If we are better able to select people up front, that means we have less work to do with them once they are hired. The worst case with a 90th percentile candidate is that they have an average year. They are unlikely to become the worst performer in the company. An average candidate, however, will not only consume massive training resources, but is also just as likely to end up performing well below average as above average.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“Your B players might be a little unhappy about their rewards, but you can address that by being honest: Explain to them why their pay is different and what they can do to change it. At the same time, be generous in your public recognition. Celebrate the achievements of teams, and make a point of cheering failures where important lessons were learned.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“Remember that performance follows a power law distribution in most jobs, no matter what your HR department tells you. Ninety percent or more of the value on your teams comes from the top 10 percent. As a result, your best people are worth far more than your average people. They might be worth 50 percent more than your average people or fifty times more, but they are absolutely worth more. Make sure they feel it. Even if you don’t have the financial resources to provide huge differences in pay, providing greater differences will mean something.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“Performance improved only when companies implemented programs to empower employees (for example, by taking decision-making authority away from managers and giving it to individuals or teams), provided learning opportunities that were outside what people needed to do their jobs, increased their reliance on teamwork (by giving teams more autonomy and allowing them to self-organize), or a combination of these. These factors “accounted for a 9% increase in value added per employee in our study.” In short, only when companies took steps to give their people more freedom did performance improve.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“What’s a manager to do without these traditional sticks and carrots? The only thing that’s left. “Managers serve the team,” according to our executive chairman, Eric Schmidt. Like any place, we of course have exceptions and failures, but the default leadership style at Google is one where a manager focuses not on punishments or rewards but on clearing roadblocks and inspiring her team.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“Another tip: “To rid yourself of saying ‘umm’ during a presentation, use physical displacement. Every time you are transitioning, do something small but physical, like moving your pen. Making a conscious effort to move your pen will turn your brain off from using a verbal filler instead.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“Training is, quite simply, one of the highest-leverage activities a manager can perform. Consider for a moment the possibility of your putting on a series of four lectures for members of your department. Let’s count on three hours of preparation for each hour of course time—twelve hours of work in total. Say that you have ten students in your class. Next year they will work a total of about twenty thousand hours for your organization. If your training results in a 1 percent improvement in your subordinates’ performance, your company will gain the equivalent of two hundred hours of work as the result of the expenditure of your twelve hours.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“when we were consultants. In the minutes before every client meeting, he would take me aside and ask me questions: “What are your goals for this meeting?” “How do you think each client will respond?” “How do you plan to introduce a difficult topic?” We’d conduct the meeting, and on the drive back to our office he would again ask questions that forced me to learn: “How did your approach work out?” “What did you learn?” “What do you want to try differently next time?” I would also ask Frank questions about the interpersonal dynamic in the room and why he pushed on one issue but not another. I shared responsibility with him for ensuring I was improving.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“Building this kind of repetition and focus into training might seem costly, but it’s not. As we’ll discuss later, most organizations measure training based on the time spent, not on the behaviors changed. It’s a better investment to deliver less content and have people retain it, than it is to deliver more hours of “learning” that is quickly forgotten.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“Most companies manage people using a normal distribution, with most people labeled as average and two tails of weak and strong performers pushed out to the sides. The tails aren’t as symmetrical as when you look at height, because failing employees get fired and the worst don’t even make it in the door, so the left tail is cut short. Companies also treat people as if their actual output follows the same distribution. That’s an error. In fact, human performance in organizations follows a power law distribution for most jobs. Herman Aguinis and Ernest O’Boyle of Indiana University and the University of Iowa explain that “instead of a massive group of average performers dominating … through sheer numbers, a small group of elite performers [dominate] through massive performance.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“Each of these decisions is instead made either by a group of peers, a committee, or a dedicated, independent team. Many newly hired managers hate this!”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“The first change is to hire more slowly. Only 10 percent of your applicants (at best!) will be top performers, so you go through far more applicants and interviews. I say at best, because in fact the top performers in most industries aren’t actually looking for work, precisely because they are top performers who are enjoying their success right where they are. So your odds of hiring a great person based on inbound applications are low. But it’s worth the wait because, as Alan Eustace, our SVP of Knowledge, often says, “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.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“Once it’s explained, it seems self-evident. But how many of us have taken the time to look for the deeper meaning in our work? How many of our companies make a practice of giving everyone, especially those most remote from the front office, access to your customers so employees can witness the human effect of their labors? Would it be hard to start?”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“Henry Ford is best known for his sweeping adoption of the assembly line. It’s less well known that his philosophy of recognizing and rewarding work was remarkably progressive for the time: The kind of workman who gives the business the best that is in him is the best kind of workman a business can have. And he cannot be expected to do this indefinitely without proper recognition. … [I]f a man feels that his day’s work is not only supplying his basic need, but is also giving him a margin of comfort, and enabling him to give his boys and girls their opportunity and his wife some pleasure in life, then his job looks good to him and he is free to give it of his best. This is a good thing for him and a good thing for the business. The man who does not get a certain satisfaction out of his day’s work is losing the best part of his pay.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“Performance improved only when companies implemented programs to empower employees (for example, by taking decision-making authority away from managers and giving it to individuals or teams), provided learning opportunities that were outside what people needed to do their jobs, increased their reliance on teamwork (by giving teams more autonomy and allowing them to self-organize), or a combination of these.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“The most talented people on the planet are increasingly physically mobile, increasingly connected through technology, and—importantly—increasingly discoverable by employers. This global cadre want to be in high-freedom companies, and talent will flow to those companies. And leaders who build the right kind of environments will be magnets for the most talented people on the planet.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead