Work Rules! Quotes

“The biggest lesson was that rewarding smart failure was vital to support a culture of risk-taking.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“In addition to pioneering a new product, the Wave team had been run in an experimental way. We were exploring whether setting milestones and allowing teams the possibility of IPO-like rewards for the achievement of IPO-like ambitions would spur greater success. They had chosen to forgo Google bonuses and stock awards for the possibility of much larger rewards. The team had worked for two years on this product, putting in countless hours in an effort to transform how people communicated online. They took a massive, calculated risk. And failed. So we rewarded them. In a sense, it was the only reasonable thing to do. We wanted to make sure that taking enormous risks wasn’t penalized.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“it’s also important to reward failure. While incentives and goals matter, the act of considered risk-taking itself needs to be rewarded, especially in the face of failure. Otherwise, people simply won’t take risks.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“We’ve found that trusting people to do the right thing generally results in them doing the right thing.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“The other capability is having managers who understand the reward system well enough that they can explain to the recipient, and to others who might ask if word were to get out, exactly why a reward was so high and what any employee can do to achieve a similar reward. In other words, the allocation of extreme awards must be just. If you can’t explain to employees the basis for such a wide range of awards, and can’t give them specific ways to improve their own performance to these superb levels, you will breed a culture of jealousy and resentment. Maybe that’s why most companies don’t bother. It’s hard work to have pay ranges where someone can make two or even ten times more than someone else. But it’s much harder to watch your highest-potential and best people walk out the door. It makes you wonder which companies are really paying unfairly: the ones where the best people make far more than average, or the ones where everyone is paid the same.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“If the best performer is generating ten times as much impact as an average performer, they shouldn’t necessarily get ten times the reward, but I’d wager they should get at least five times the reward.180 If you’re adopting a system like this, the only way to stay within budget is to give smaller rewards to the poorer performers, or even the average ones. That won’t feel good initially, but take comfort in knowing that you’ve now given your best people a reason to stay with you, and everyone else a reason to aim higher.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“Project Oxygen has had the most profound impact on Google. The name comes from a question Michelle once asked: “What if everyone at Google had an amazing manager? Not a fine one or a good one, but one that really understood them and made them excited to come to work each day. What would Google feel like then?” Neal was in the habit of naming his projects after elements from the periodic table, so Michelle proposed Project Oxygen, because “having a good manager is essential, like breathing. And if we make managers better, it would be like a breath of fresh air.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“The truth is that people usually live up to your expectations, whether those expectations are high or low. Edwin Locke and Gary Latham, in their 1990 book A Theory of Goal Setting & Task Performance, showed that difficult, specific goals (“Try to get more than 90 percent correct”) were not only more motivating than vague exhortations or low expectations (“Try your best”), but that they actually resulted in superior performance”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“Instead, decisions should be made at the lowest possible level of an organization. The only questions that should rise up the org chart are ones where, Serrat continues, “given the same data and information,” more senior leaders would make a different decision than the rank and file.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“I’ve just devoted much of this chapter to explaining why managers should not have authority. But hierarchy in decision-making is important. It’s the only way to break ties and is ultimately one of the primary responsibilities of management.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“As Hal Varian told me, “Relying on data helps out everyone. Senior executives shouldn’t be wasting time debating whether the best background color for an ad is yellow or blue. Just run an experiment. This leaves management free to worry about the stuff that is hard to quantify, which is usually a much better use of their time.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“Relying on data—indeed, expecting every conversation to be rooted in data—upends the traditional role of managers. It transforms them from being providers of intuition to facilitators in a search for truth, with the most useful facts being brought to bear on each decision.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“Remember that the primary definition of “asylum” is “a place of refuge.” One of the nobler aspirations of a workplace should be that it’s a place of refuge where people are free to create, build, and grow. Why not let the inmates run the asylum?”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“But what struck me at the time was that even at a company that aspires to give people so much freedom, the introduction of simple rules caused large changes in behavior.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“In most organizations, you join and then have to prove yourself. At Google, there’s such faith in the quality of the hiring process that people join and on their first day are trusted and full members of their teams.”
― 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. It takes will and patience, but it works. Be willing to concentrate your people investment on hiring. And never settle.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“The hiring machine was overly conservative by design. It focused on avoiding false positives—the people who looked good in the interview process but actually would not perform well—because we would rather have missed hiring two great performers if it meant we would also avoid hiring a lousy one.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“We thought requesting grades and transcripts was a blunt instrument to get at smarts. And it did weed out the disappointing number of people who lied about their records. But in 2010, our analyses revealed that academic performance didn’t predict job performance beyond the first two or three years after college, so we stopped requiring grades and transcripts except from recent graduates.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“All this information and more would be assembled into a hiring packet of fifty pages or more per candidate and reviewed by a hiring committee. There were many hiring committees, and each would be composed of people who were familiar with the job being filled but didn’t have a direct stake in it. For example, a hiring committee for online sales roles would be made up of salespeople, but would not include the hiring manager or anyone who would directly work with the candidate. This was to ensure objectivity.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“The sole purpose of these two teams is to ensure that we stay true to the high-quality bar set by the founders. If you start a company or team, you know exactly what you are looking for in a new hire: someone just as motivated, clever, interesting, and passionate as you are about the new venture. And the first few people you hire will meet that standard. But they in turn won’t uniformly hire to the same standard as you, not because they are bad or incompetent people, but because they won’t have precisely the same understanding of what you are looking for.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“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

“So we’re left with two paths to assembling phenomenal talent. You can find a way to hire the very best, or you can hire average performers and try to turn them into the best. Put bluntly, which of the following situations would you rather be in? We hire 90th percentile performers, who start doing great work right away. We hire average performers, and through our training programs hope eventually to turn them into 90th percentile performers. Doesn’t seem like a hard choice when it’s put that way, especially once you realize there’s probably enough money in your budget to get these exceptional people—it’s just being spent in the wrong places. Companies continue to invest substantially more in training than in hiring, according to the Corporate Executive Board.74 Per employee Training spend: $606.36 Hiring spend: $456.44 % of total HR expense Training spend: 18.3% Hiring spend: 13.6% % of revenue Training spend: 0.18% Hiring spend: 0.15% Companies spent more on training current employees than on hiring new employees. Data from 2012.”
― 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! Even once they get their heads around the way hiring works, promotion time comes around and they are dumbfounded that they can’t unilaterally promote those whom they believe to be their best people. The problem is that you and I might define our “best people” differently. Or it might be possible that your worst person is better than my best person, in which case you should promote everyone and I should promote no one. If you’re solving for what is most fair across the entire organization, which in turn helps employees have greater trust in the company and makes rewards more meaningful, managers must give up this power and allow outcomes to be calibrated across groups.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“Command-oriented, low-freedom management is common because it’s profitable, it requires less effort, and most managers are terrified of the alternative. It’s easy to run a team that does what they are told. But to have to explain to them why they’re doing something? And then debate whether it’s the right thing to do? What if they disagree with me? What if my team doesn’t want to do what I tell them to? And won’t I look like an idiot if I’m wrong? It’s faster and more efficient to just tell the team what to do and then make sure they deliver. Right?”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“Jodee Kozlak, CHRO of Target, is an attorney by training, as was Allen Hill, who recently retired from the same role at UPS. (Both are friends of mine, and both are brilliant at their jobs.) Microsoft’s head of HR, Lisa Brummel, grew up in product management, eBay’s Beth Axelrod was a consultant, and Palantir’s Michael Lopp was an engineer.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“Sample UFS Feedback Questionnaire My manager gives me actionable feedback that helps me improve my performance. My manager does not “micromanage” (i.e., get involved in details that should be handled at other levels). My manager shows consideration for me as a person. My manager keeps the team focused on our priority results/deliverables. My manager regularly shares relevant information from his/her manager and senior leadership. My manager has had a meaningful discussion with me about my career development in the past six months. My manager communicates clear goals for our team. My manager has the technical expertise (e.g., coding in Tech, accounting in Finance) required to effectively manage me. I would recommend my manager to other Googlers.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“we found that women are less likely to nominate themselves for promotion, but that when they do, they are promoted at slightly higher rates than men.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“(Though, sadly, both Larry and Sergey, who take only $1 per year in salary, declined my offer to raise their salaries by 10 percent … to $1.10 per year.)”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“If after we go public I see any lamborghinis in our parking lot, you better buy two of them because I’m going to take a baseball bat to the windshield of any parked here.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“You can automate a lot of things, but you can’t automate relationships”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead