Work Rules! Quotes

“We have a market-based approach, where over time our goals all converge, because the top OKRs are known and everyone else’s OKRs are visible. Teams that are grossly out of alignment stand out, and the few major initiatives that touch everyone are easy enough to manage directly. So”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“On the topic of goals, the academic research agrees with your intuition: Having goals improves performance.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“We deliberately set ambitious goals that we know we won’t be able to achieve in all cases. If you’re achieving all your goals, you’re not setting them aggressively enough. Astro”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“Google board member John Doerr introduced us to a practice he had seen Intel use with much success: OKRs, or Objectives and Key Results. The”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“Chris Argyris, professor emeritus at Harvard Business School, wrote a lovely article in 1977,191 in which he looked at the performance of Harvard Business School graduates ten years after graduation. By and large, they got stuck in middle management, when they had all hoped to become CEOs and captains of industry. What happened? Argyris found that when they inevitably hit a roadblock, their ability to learn collapsed: What’s more, those members of the organization that many assume to be the best at learning are, in fact, not very good at it. I am talking about the well-educated, high-powered, high-commitment professionals who occupy key leadership positions in the modern corporation.… Put simply, because many professionals are almost always successful at what they do, they rarely experience failure. And because they have rarely failed, they have never learned how to learn from failure.… [T]hey become defensive, screen out criticism, and put the “blame” on anyone and everyone but themselves. In short, their ability to learn shuts down precisely at the moment they need it the most.192 [italics mine] A year or two after Wave, Jeff Huber was running our Ads engineering team. He had a policy that any notable bug or mistake would be discussed at his team meeting in a “What did we learn?” session. He wanted to make sure that bad news was shared as openly as good news, so that he and his leaders were never blind to what was really happening and to reinforce the importance of learning from mistakes. In one session, a mortified engineer confessed, “Jeff, I screwed up a line of code and it cost us a million dollars in revenue.” After leading the team through the postmortem and fixes, Jeff concluded, “Did we get more than a million dollars in learning out of this?” “Yes.” “Then get back to work.”193 And it works in other settings too. A Bay Area public school, the Bullis Charter School in Los Altos, takes this approach to middle school math. If a child misses a question on a math test, they can try the question again for half credit. As their principal, Wanny Hersey, told me, “These are smart kids, but in life they are going to hit walls once in a while. It’s vital they master geometry, algebra one, and algebra two, but it’s just as important that they respond to failure by trying again instead of giving up.” In the 2012–2013 academic year, Bullis was the third-highest-ranked middle school in California.194”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“The goal of our interview process is to predict how candidates will perform once they join the team. We achieve that goal by doing what the science says: combining behavioral and situational structured interviews with assessments of cognitive ability, conscientiousness, and leadership.xxvi”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“People interpret strong cultures based on the artifacts, because they’re the most visible, but the values and assumptions underneath matter much more.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“improve”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“This teaching environment is tailored to a child’s learning needs and personality, and children are encouraged to question everything, act of their own volition, and create.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“When employees trust the leadership, they become brand ambassadors and in turn cause progressive change in their families, society, and environment.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“Rob Rosiello, who ran McKinsey’s Stamford, Connecticut, office while I was there, used to say that the most profitable line in the English language was “Would you like fries with that?”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“Bill Gates took a more aggressive view, purportedly saying, “A great lathe operator commands several times the wage of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“Omid Kordestani was at Netscape before coming to Google. As Omid tells it, “Jim Barksdale, the legendary CEO of Netscape, in one of these management meetings said, ‘If you have facts, present them and we’ll use them. But if you have opinions, we’re gonna use mine.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“This is why we take as much power away from managers as we can. The less formal authority they have, the fewer carrots and sticks they have to lord over their teams, and the more latitude the teams have to innovate.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“Tiger, what are you doing out here hitting balls at three a.m.?” “It doesn’t rain very often in Northern California,” replied the kid who went on to become one of the most successful golfers in history. “It’s the only chance I have to practice hitting in the rain.” You might expect this kind of diligence from the best athlete in his field. What is fascinating is how narrow the exercise’s scope was. He wasn’t practicing putting or hitting from a sand bunker. He spent four hours standing in the rain, hitting the same shot from the same spot, pursuing perfection in an intensely specific skill. It turns out that’s the best way to learn. K. Anders Ericsson, a professor of psychology at Florida State University, has studied the acquisition of expert-level skill for decades. The conventional wisdom is that it takes ten thousand hours of effort to become an expert. Ericsson instead found that it’s not about how much time you spend learning, but rather how you spend that time. He finds evidence that people who attain mastery of a field, whether they are violinists, surgeons, athletes,144 or even spelling bee champions,145approach learning in a different way from the rest of us. They shard their activities into tiny actions, like hitting the same golf shot in the rain for hours, and repeat them relentlessly. Each time, they observe what happens, make minor—almost imperceptible—adjustments, and improve. Ericsson refers to this as deliberate practice: intentional repetitions of similar, small tasks with immediate feedback, correction, and experimentation.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“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

“An engineering manager who can’t code is not going to be able to lead a team at Google. But of the behaviors that differentiated the very best, technical input made the smallest difference to teams.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“culture: mission, transparency, and voice.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“In Give and Take, he writes about the power of purpose to”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“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

“Intrinsic motivation is the key to growth, but conventional performance management systems destroy that motivation.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“As Larry often says: If your goals are ambitious and crazy enough, even failure will be a pretty good achievement.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“As Larry often points out, “If you set a crazy, ambitious goal and miss it, you’ll still achieve something remarkable.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“As Olivier Serrat of the Asian Development Bank wrote, “Micromanagement is mismanagement.… [P]eople micromanage to assuage their anxieties about organizational performance: they feel better if they are continuously directing and controlling the actions of others—at heart, this reveals emotional insecurity on their part. It gives micromanagers the illusion of control (or usefulness). Another motive is lack of trust in the abilities of staff—micromanagers do not believe that their colleagues will successfully complete a task or discharge a responsibility even when they say they will.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“As Sergey has commented: “I do think I benefited from the Montessori education, which in some ways gives the students a lot more freedoms to do things at their own pace.” Marissa Mayer, at the time a Google vice president of product management and now CEO of Yahoo, told Steven Levy in his book In the Plex: “You can’t understand Google… unless you know that both Larry and Sergey were Montessori kids.”22 This teaching environment is tailored to a child’s learning needs and personality, and children are encouraged to question everything, act of their own volition, and create.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“one of our earliest challenges was that users would look at the Google Web page and not type anything. We couldn’t figure out why until we went out and did a user study at a nearby college, actually watching students try to use Google. According to Marissa Mayer, at the time a Googler and now CEO of Yahoo, they were so accustomed to cluttered websites that “flashed, revolved, and asked you to punch the monkey” that they thought there had to be more coming.165 They weren’t searching because they were waiting for the page to finish loading. Engineering vice president Jen Fitzpatrick added: “We wound up sticking a copyright tag at the bottom of the page, not so much because we needed a copyright on the page, but because it was a way to say ‘This is the end.’” The copyright notice fixed the problem.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“We couldn’t figure out why until we went out and did a user study at a nearby college, actually watching students try to use Google. According to Marissa Mayer, at the time a Googler and now CEO of Yahoo, they were so accustomed to cluttered websites that “flashed, revolved, and asked you to punch the monkey” that they thought there had to be more coming.165 They weren’t searching because they were waiting for the page to finish loading. Engineering vice president Jen Fitzpatrick added: “We wound up sticking a copyright tag at the bottom of the page, not so much because we needed a copyright on the page, but because it was a way to say ‘This is the end.’” The copyright notice fixed the problem.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“Marissa Mayer, at the time a Google vice president of product management and now CEO of Yahoo, told Steven Levy in his book In the Plex: “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

“The joy of money is fleeting, but memories last forever.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

“how to pay people—and how to do so fairly and in consonance with our values—has always been a serious question at Google.”
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead