How Google Works Quotes

“Innovative people do not need to be told to do it, they need to be allowed to do it.”
― Eric Schmidt, How Google Works

“If you focus on your competition, you will never deliver anything truly innovative.”
― Eric Schmidt, How Google Works

“Over time I’ve learned, surprisingly, that it’s tremendously hard to get teams to be super ambitious. It turns out most people haven’t been educated in this kind of moonshot thinking. They tend to assume that things are impossible, rather than starting from real-world physics and figuring out what’s actually possible. It’s why we’ve put so much energy into hiring independent thinkers at Google, and setting big goals. Because if you hire the right people and have big enough dreams, you’ll usually get there. And even if you fail, you’ll probably learn something important. It’s also true that many companies get comfortable doing what they have always done, with a few incremental changes. This kind of incrementalism leads to irrelevance over time, especially in technology, because change tends to be revolutionary not evolutionary. So you need to force yourself to place big bets on the future.”
― Eric Schmidt, How Google Works

“Google dress code was: "You must wear something".”
― Eric Schmidt, How Google Works

“As Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, says: “In the old world, you devoted 30 percent of your time to building a great service and 70 percent of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.”
― Eric Schmidt, How Google Works

“Make sure you would work for yourself.”
― Eric Schmidt, How Google Works

“If I give you a penny, then you’re a penny richer and I’m a penny poorer, but if I give you an idea, then you will have a new idea but I’ll have it too.”
― Eric Schmidt, How Google Works

“I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.”
― Eric Schmidt, How Google Works

“To innovate, you must learn to fail well. Learn from your mistakes:”
― Eric Schmidt, How Google Works

“You need to have confidence in your people, and enough self-confidence to let them identify a better way.”
― Eric Schmidt, How Google Works

“You should hire the best engineer you can find, regardless of her coding preference, because if she’s the best she can down enough Java to C how to make the Python Go.”
― Eric Schmidt, How Google Works

“The most valuable result of 20 percent time isn’t the products and features that get created, it’s the things that people learn when they try something new.”
― Eric Schmidt, How Google Works

“The human race built most nobly when limitations were greatest.”
― Eric Schmidt, How Google Works

“If you want something done, give it to a busy person.”
― Eric Schmidt, How Google Works

“ego creates blind spots.”
― Eric Schmidt, How Google Works

“It helps to see failure as a road and not a wall.”
― Eric Schmidt, How Google Works

“Favoring specialization over intelligence is exactly wrong, especially in high tech. The world is changing so fast across every industry and endeavor that it's a given the role for which you're hiring is going to change. Yesterday's widget will be obsolete tomorrow, and hiring a specialist in such a dynamic environment can backfire. A specialist brings an inherent bias to solving problems that spawns from the very expertise that is his putative advantage, and may be threatened by a new type of solution that requires new expertise. A smart generalist doesn't have bias, so is free to survey the wide range of solutions and gravitate to the best one.”
― Eric Schmidt, How Google Works

“if the past is any indicator of our future, today’s big bets won’t seem so wild in a few years’ time.”
― Eric Schmidt, How Google Works

“Work-life balance. This is another touchstone of supposedly “enlightened” management practices that can be insulting to smart, dedicated employees. The phrase itself is part of the problem: For many people, work is an important part of life, not something to be separated. The best cultures invite and enable people to be overworked in a good way, with too many interesting things to do both at work and at home.”
― Eric Schmidt, How Google Works

“John Dewey, an American philosopher and writer, said that “a problem well put is half solved.”
― Eric Schmidt, How Google Works

“It is the ultimate luxury to combine passion and contribution. It’s also a very clear path to happiness.”
― Eric Schmidt, How Google Works

“The business should always be outrunning the processes, so chaos is right where you want to be.”
― Eric Schmidt, How Google Works

“Voltaire wrote, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.”188 Steve Jobs told the Macintosh team that “real artists ship.”189 New ideas are never perfect right out of the chute, and you don’t have time to wait until they get there. Create a product, ship it, see how it does, design and implement improvements, and push it back out. Ship and iterate. The companies that are the fastest at this process will win.”
― Eric Schmidt, How Google Works

“The business world traditionally rewards people for being closer to the top (case in point: outrageous CEO salaries) or for being closer to the transactions (investment bankers, salespeople).”
― Eric Schmidt, How Google Works

“Meetings should have a single decision-maker/owner. There must be a clear decision-maker at every point in the process, someone whose butt is on the line. A meeting between two groups of equals often doesn’t result in a good outcome, because you end up compromising rather than making the best tough decisions. Include someone more senior as the decision-maker. The decision-maker should be hands on. He or she should call the meeting, ensure that the content is good, set the objectives, determine the participants, and share the agenda (if possible) at least twenty-four hours in advance. After the meeting, the decision-maker (and no one else) should summarize decisions taken and action items by email to at least every participant—as well as any others who need to know—within forty-eight hours.”
― Eric Schmidt, How Google Works

“Don’t tell me, show me.”
― Eric Schmidt, How Google Works

“Knaves are not to be confused with divas. Knavish behavior is a product of low integrity; diva-ish behavior is one of high exceptionalism. Knaves prioritize the individual over the team; divas think they are better than the team, but want success equally for both. Knaves need to be dealt with as quickly as possible.”
― Eric Schmidt, How Google Works

“Passionate people don’t wear their passion on their sleeves; they have it in their hearts. They live it. Passion is more than résumé-deep, because its hallmarks—persistence, grit, seriousness, all-encompassing absorption—cannot be gauged from a checklist. Nor is it always synonymous with success. If someone is truly passionate about something, they’ll do it for a long time even if they aren’t at first successful. Failure is often part of the deal. (This is one reason we value athletes, because sports teach how to rebound from loss, or at least give you plenty of opportunities to do so.) The passionate person will often talk at length, aka ramble, about his pursuits. This pursuit can be professional. In our world, “perfecting search” is a great example of something people can spend an entire career on and still find challenging and engaging every day. But it can also be a hobby.”
― Eric Schmidt, How Google Works

“information is costly to produce but cheap to reproduce.”
― Eric Schmidt, How Google Works

“Here are some simple steps to creating a plan: Think about your ideal job, not today but five years from now. Where do you want to be? What do you want to do? How much do you want to make? Write down the job description: If you saw this job on a website, what would the posting look like? Now fast forward four or five years and assume you are in that job. What does your five-years-from-now résumé look like? What’s the path you took from now to then to get to your best”
― Eric Schmidt, How Google Works