Work Rules! Quotes

“«La cultura toma estrategia para desayunar» Si concede libertad a las personas le sorprenderán”
― Laszlo Bock, La nueva fórmula del trabajo: Revelaciones de Google que cambiarán su forma de vivir y liderar

“You can’t understand Google… unless you know that both Larry and Sergey were Montessori kids.”22”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“Closer to home, the 1999 film Office Space, which deadpanned the meaningless rituals and bureaucracy of a fictional technology company, became a cult hit because it was instantly recognizable. In the movie, programmer Peter Gibbons describes his job to a hypnotherapist: Peter: So I was sitting in my cubicle today, and I realized, ever since I started working, every single day of my life has been worse than the day before it. So that means that every single day that you see me, that’s on the worst day of my life. Dr. Swanson: What about today? Is today the worst day of your life? Peter: Yeah. Dr. Swanson: Wow, that’s messed up.14”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“How can you tell if you have found someone exceptional? My simple rule of thumb—and the second big change to make in how you hire—is: “Only hire people who are better than you.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“One of my hopes in writing this book is that anyone reading it starts thinking of themselves as a founder. Maybe not of an entire company, but the founder of a team, a family, a culture. The fundamental lesson from Google’s experience is that you must first choose whether you want to be a founder or an employee. It’s not a question of literal ownership. It’s a question of attitude.”
― 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

“a robust culture is essential to success.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“Not every problem can be resolved with data. Reasonable people can look at the same set of facts and disagree, particularly where values are concerned.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“If you’re committed to transforming your team or your organization, hiring better is the single best way to do it.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“The best predictor of how someone will perform in a job is a work sample test (29 percent). This entails giving candidates a sample piece of work, similar to that which they would do in the job, and assessing their performance at it.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“Unstructured interviews have an r2 of 0.14, meaning that they can explain only 14 percent of an employee’s performance.xxiii This is somewhat ahead of reference checks (explaining 7 percent of performance), ahead of the number of years of work experience (3 percent), and well ahead of “graphology,” or handwriting analysis (0.04 percent),”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“And behind the scenes, People Operations aspires to have thought through the experience meticulously, clearing away all the stones in your path so there’s nothing to trip you up.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“People are happy when you give them what they ask for. People are delighted when you anticipate what they didn’t think to ask for.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“our analyses revealed that academic performance didn’t predict job performance beyond the first two or three years after college,”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“Give people slightly more trust, freedom, and authority than you are comfortable giving them. If you’re not nervous, you haven’t given them enough.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“Does your manager trust you?” is a profound question. If you believe people are fundamentally good, and if your organization is able to hire well, there is nothing to fear from giving your people freedom.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“As Prasad Setty explains, “Traditional performance management systems make a big mistake. They combine two things that should be completely separate: performance evaluation and people development. Evaluation is necessary to distribute finite resources, like salary increases or bonus dollars. Development is just as necessary so people grow and improve.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“The major problem with performance management systems today is that they have become substitutes for the vital act of actually managing people.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“Adam Grant has an answer. In Give and Take, he writes about the power of purpose to improve not just happiness, but also productivity. 50 His answer, like many brilliant insights, seems obvious once it’s pointed out. The big surprise is how huge the impact is. Adam looked at paid employees in a university’s fund-raising call center. Their job was to call potential donors and ask for contributions. He divided them into three groups. Group A was the control group, and just did their jobs. Group B read stories from other employees about the personal benefits of the job: learning and money. Group C read stories from scholarship recipients about how the scholarships had changed their lives. Groups A and B saw no difference in performance. Group C, in contrast, grew their weekly pledges by 155 percent (to twenty-three a week from nine a week) and weekly fund-raising by 143 percent (to $ 3,130 from $ 1,288). If reading”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“Most companies, including Google until a few years ago, celebrate promotions but do nothing to reach out to the people who just missed the cut. Which is madness. It takes an hour or two to spot the folks you think will be upset and talk to them about how to continue growing. It’s the way you would want to be treated. It’s more procedurally just, which helps people perceive the process as more open and honest. It’s far better for the company than having someone quit, losing their productivity while you look for a replacement, recruit someone, and then bring them up to speed. And, at a very vulnerable time in someone’s career, you’re helping him understand what happened and using a demotivating event to ignite his drive.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“Hire by committee, set objective standards in advance, never compromise, and periodically check if your new hires are better than your old ones. The proof that you are hiring well is that nine out of ten new hires are better than you are.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“But it is an error ever to compromise on hiring quality. A bad hire is toxic, not only destroying their own performance, but also dragging down the performance, morale, and energy of those around them. If being down a person means everyone else has to work harder in the short term, just remind them of the last jerk they had to work with.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“Innovation thrives on creativity and experimentation, but it also requires thoughtful pruning. With tens of thousands of employees and billions of users, there are infinite opportunities to create. And we attract people who want to do just that. But freedom is not absolute, and being part of a team, an organization, means that on some level you’ve agreed to give up some small measure of personal freedom in exchange for the promise of accomplishing more together than you could alone.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“More significantly, Google isn’t some sweetly baited trap designed to trick people into staying at the office working all the time. Why would we care how many hours people work, if their output is good? And the reality is that where you work shouldn’t matter at all. It’s absolutely necessary to have teams come together, and we get great product ideas and partnerships resulting from people bumping into each other. But do I want people in the office from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.? Is there any reason I’d want them there earlier? Or later? People should and do come and go as they please. Many engineers don’t roll in until 10:00 a.m. or later. After they head home, there’s another burst of activity online in the evenings as people log back in. It’s not up to us to tell people when they should be creative.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“The trick is, can you get an idea which is mundane and well known in one place to another place where people would get value out of it.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“We dot our floors with microkitchens, pockets where you can grab a coffee, a piece of organic fruit, or a snack, and take a few minutes to relax. Often you’ll see Googlers chatting and comparing notes over a cookie and a chessboard or around a pool table. Sergey once said, “No one should be more than two hundred feet away from food,” but the real purpose of these microkitchens is to do the same thing Howard Schultz tried to create with Starbucks. Schultz saw the need for a “third place” beyond the home and office, where people could relax, refresh, and connect with one another. We try to do the same thing, by giving Googlers a place to meet up that looks and feels different from their desk. And we use the placement of these microkitchens to draw people from different groups together. Often they’ll sit at the border between two different teams, with the goal of having those people bump into one another. At minimum, they might have a great conversation. And maybe they’ll hit on an idea for our users that hasn’t been thought of yet.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“A sense of community helps people do their best work just as surely as increasing efficiency does by sweeping away minor chores and distractions. As we’ve grown, we’ve fought to maintain the sense of community we had when we were just a handful of people, and we’ve expanded our definition of community to include Googlers’ children, spouses, partners, parents, and even grandparents.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“In contrast, our founders’ letter from our 2004 IPO filing read: We provide many unusual benefits for our employees, including meals free of charge, doctors and washing machines. We are careful to consider the long-term advantages to the company of these benefits. Expect us to add benefits rather than pare them down over time. We believe it is easy to be penny wise and pound foolish with respect to benefits that can save employees considerable time and improve their health and productivity. [italics mine]”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“the underlying notion that performance follows a power law distribution would have been true at almost any place I’ve worked, whether it was at a public school, a charitable nonprofit, a restaurant, or in consulting.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead