How Google Works – Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg
I hope you all are having a great start to the new year! As resolutions go, I’m continuing mine from 2019 because I love reading on the bus and I like taking what I’ve learned to my work/personal life. This week, I’m going to post highlights on How Google Works by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg.
Highlights
- As a company gets big and complex, you can’t just organize around people who create innovation; you need to organize around people who can create and lead entire new ventures and businesses.
- We are smart enough to realize that we aren’t that smart.
- In the old world, you devoted 30% of your time to building a great service and 70% of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.
- Always question the status quo and attack things differently.
- If you can’t tell someone how to think then you have to learn to manage the environment where they think and make it a place where they want to come every day.
- Your employees need to care about the place they work. Culture is the most important thing to consider when starting a new company.
- People’s BS detectors are finely tuned when it comes to corporate-speak; they can tell when you don’t mean it.
- It is the quality of the idea that matters, not who suggests it.
- You need to have confidence in your people, and enough self-confidence to let them identify a better way.
- Your title makes you a manager, your people make you a leader.
- You want to invest in the people who are going to do what they think is right, whether or not you give them permission. These people are your best smart creatives.
- The character of a company is the sum of the characters of its people, so if you strive for a company of sterling character, that is the standard you must set for your employees.
- Great people are often unusual and difficult, and some of the quirks can be off-putting but it doesn’t make them any less great.
- If you’re working your butt off without deriving any enjoyment, something’s probably wrong.
- Bet on technical insights that help solve a big problem in a novel way, optimize for scale, not for revenue.
- Giving the customer what he wants is less important than giving him what he doesn’t yet know he wants.
- If you focus on your competition, you will never deliver anything truly innovative.
- Our tendency is to think of what already exists. It’s time to think of the thing you haven’t thought of yet that you really need.
- You must be proud of your enemy; then your enemy’s successes are also your successes. Be proud of your competitors but don’t follow them.
- The company matters more than the manager.
- Always hire people who are smarter than you.
- You must work with people you don’t like because a workforce comprised of people who are all buds can be homogenous and this breeds failure.
- Hire for inexperience because it’ll bring you those who don’t usually know what’s supposed to be impossible.
- Hire for passion because passionate people have an exuberant presence.
- If you are ready for your ideal job today, you aren’t thinking big enough.
- One of the best, easiest ways to get ahead in a field is to know more about it.
- A problem well put is half solved.
- If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.
- Data is not personal so use it to get everyone to weigh in.
- Be interested in finding the best way, not having it your own way.
- If you’re not sure if a course of action is right, the best thing you can do is try it out then correct course.
- PIA rule: Patience, information, and alternatives. Take a moment to assess a situation before deciding what to do.
- The world’s best athletes need coaches, and you don’t?
- The most effective leaders today don’t hoard information, they share it.
- The essence of being human involves asking questions, not answering them.
- Climb, confess, comply: Get yourself out of danger, confess how you screwed up, and comply when you’re told how to do it better for the next time.
- If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough. The business should always be outrunning the processes, so chaos is right where you want to be.
- For something to be innovative, it needs to be new and surprising, and radically useful.
- Before there can innovation, there has to be context for innovation.
- Innovative people don’t need to be told to do it, they need to be allowed to do it.
- Bias is always towards the user.
- Creativity loves constraint. It’s why frames and sonnets have fourteen lines. We do more under forced restrictions.
- The perfect is the enemy of the good.
Anyone who stops learning is old.
*I take no credit for any of these points.