Business Management Technology

How Google Works (Summary)

by Eric Schmidt & Jonathan Rosenberg

When Eric Schmidt was trying to hire Sheryl Sandberg, she had multiple competing offers and demanded to know her exact job title and role. Schmidt's response? "If you're offered a seat on a rocket ship, you don't ask what seat. You just get on." This single piece of advice captures the essence of Google's philosophy: in a fast-changing world, the team and the trajectory matter far more than a predefined role.

Hire Learning Animals, Not Experts

Google prioritizes raw intelligence, curiosity, and a bias for action over specific, resume-based experience. They believe these 'smart creatives' can learn any domain and will constantly challenge the status quo, which is more valuable than hiring a specialist who only knows how things were done yesterday.

Early in its history, Google hired a neuroscientist to run a business unit. They weren't looking for business experience; they were looking for a brilliant analytical mind capable of learning quickly and solving problems from first principles.

Default to Open

Transparency is the default setting at Google. Sharing informationā€”from project roadmaps to performance dataā€”as widely as possible empowers employees, fosters collaboration, and ensures that ideas are judged on merit, not on the seniority of the person who proposed them.

New engineers get access to almost the entire Google codebase on their first day. The company also holds weekly all-hands meetings called 'TGIF' where founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin take unfiltered, often tough questions from any employee on any topic.

Ship and Iterate

In the internet age, perfection is the enemy of progress. The competitive advantage goes to those who can launch a product quickly to get real user feedback, and then relentlessly improve it, rather than waiting to build the 'perfect' product in isolation.

Google launched its Chrome browser as a minimal beta product focused on just two things: speed and stability. Instead of adding every feature imaginable, they released it early and then rapidly added features and fixed bugs based on how millions of people actually used it, quickly overtaking established competitors.

Organize the Company Around the People Who Matter Most

In a traditional company, managers tell engineers what to build. At Google, the power structure is inverted. The engineersā€”the 'smart creatives'ā€”are the core, and the managers' job is to serve them by clearing obstacles and providing resources, not by dictating direction.

Instead of assigning engineers to projects, Google created a central 'snippet' system where managers post problems they need to solve. Engineers then choose which projects they want to work on, ensuring that the company's most valuable talent is always working on what they find most compelling and important.

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