In one sentence
In fast-moving technology markets, traditional hierarchy and fixed planning are less valuable than exceptional talent, strong technical insight, user obsession, open disagreement, and a culture that lets people experiment. The organization’s job is to create the conditions in which “smart creatives” can do their best work at scale.
Overview
This is not a technical explanation of how Google Search or its other products work; it is a management and organizational account. The authors move from culture and strategy through hiring, careers, decisions, communication, and innovation, using Google anecdotes to illustrate principles such as “think 10X, not 10%,” “default to open,” and “ship and iterate.”
Core ideas
Culture is an operating system
Values must shape everyday behavior rather than remain slogans. The preferred culture is unusually open, informal, crowded with talented people, tolerant of messiness, and designed to encourage initiative. The authors favor relationships and information flow over rigid hierarchy, while still arguing for clear ownership and accountability.
Hire “smart creatives”
The ideal employee combines deep expertise with curiosity, judgment, business sense, and creative problem-solving. Hiring is treated as the highest-leverage managerial task: protect quality, widen the search, use structured interviews, and avoid lowering standards because a role feels urgent.
Let technical insight lead strategy
Rather than relying primarily on conventional market research or copying competitors, look for technological changes that make new products or business models possible. Plans are provisional; growth opportunities often emerge from combining technologies, markets, and capabilities in unexpected ways.
Consensus requires dissent
Good decisions are not produced by superficial agreement. Invite disagreement, distinguish debate from personal conflict, use data where it clarifies the issue, and assign an owner who can decide when discussion has reached its limit. Consensus means informed commitment, not unanimous enthusiasm.
Communicate as a router
Leaders should move information across the organization, make it safe to tell the truth, repeat important messages, know the details, and reduce barriers between teams. Openness is presented as a way to improve decisions—not merely as a cultural preference.
Innovation needs room and pressure
Create an environment where ideas can come from anywhere, ambitious goals stretch conventional thinking, and teams can release products, learn from use, and iterate. The book highlights experimentation, user focus, “20 percent time,” and learning from failures without treating every failure as equally acceptable.
Scale through people, not bureaucracy
The authors argue for small, empowered teams, managers with limited spans of control, and organizational structures that follow high-impact talent. Their model attempts to preserve startup speed while the company grows, although it depends heavily on unusually capable employees and leaders.
Practical takeaways
- Identify the few technical, customer, or behavioral insights that could change the size of the opportunity; do not confuse a detailed plan with a sound strategy.
- Make hiring quality a protected constraint. Improve sourcing and interviewing before adding more process or accepting a merely adequate candidate.
- In meetings, require real disagreement, name the decision owner, define when the decision will be made, and record the reasoning.
- Default to sharing information internally, except where privacy, security, legal obligations, or competitive realities require limits.
- Give teams ambitious outcomes rather than prescribing every step; then use prototypes, user feedback, and metrics to refine the work.
- Reward people who increase the organization’s capabilities, not only those who preserve existing operations.
- When applying Google’s practices, separate the principle from the perk: autonomy, openness, and experimentation may transfer better than office informality or long-hours expectations.
Caveats and counterpoints
- The book is an insider’s account written by senior Google executives and is therefore selective. A serious review argues that it sometimes reads like institutional self-presentation and smooths over uncomfortable episodes or contradictions in Google’s history.
- The model assumes access to scarce technical talent, substantial resources, strong product-market opportunities, and a large technology platform. Smaller, regulated, operationally intensive, or safety-critical organizations may need more structure and slower experimentation.
- The authors’ praise of intensity and close integration between work and life can conflict with sustainable workloads, caregiving responsibilities, and healthy work-life boundaries; this criticism is specifically raised in contemporary reviewing.
- “Don’t follow the competition” is useful as an antidote to imitation but too absolute as a rule: competitors can reveal customer expectations, strategic threats, and evidence that an idea is already failing.
- Google’s success cannot be attributed to management culture alone. Timing, search quality, network effects, distribution, capital, acquisitions, and market structure also mattered; the book tends to foreground the controllable managerial explanation.
Questions worth revisiting
- Which of the book’s principles would still work if exceptional technical talent were unavailable?
- Where should openness stop because of privacy, security, legal, or competitive constraints?
- What evidence would distinguish productive dissent from endless debate?
- Which current team or product would benefit from a 10X ambition, and which actually needs a dependable 10% improvement?
- What parts of Google’s culture are principles worth transferring, and what parts are artifacts of a wealthy technology company?
- How should experimentation be governed when failures impose material harm on customers or the public?
Return to this when…
Return to the sections on hiring, decision-making, and innovation when designing a team or product-development process. Revisit the caveats alongside the book whenever its Google-specific practices are being treated as universal management laws.
Highlights
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.
When Sergey and Larry founded Google in 1998, they had no formal business training or experience. They considered this an advantage, not a liability. As the company grew out of its first home in a Stanford dorm room, to Susan Wojcicki’s garage6 in Menlo Park, to offices in Palo Alto and then Mountain View, the founders ran it on a few simple principles, first and foremost of which was to focus on the user. They believed that if they created great services, they could figure out the money stuff later. If all they did was create the world’s best search engine, they would be very successful.7 Their plan for creating that great search engine, and all the other great services, was equally simple: Hire as many talented software engineers as possible, and give them freedom.
A few months later, Jonathan presented Larry with a product plan that was a manifestation of the gate-based approach at its finest. There were milestones and approvals, priorities, and a two-year plan of what products Google would release and when. It was a masterpiece of textbook thinking. All that remained was for him to receive a rousing round of applause and a pat on the back. Sadly, this was not to be: Larry hated it. “Have you ever seen a scheduled plan that the team beat?” he asked. Um, no. “Have your teams ever delivered better products than what was in the plan?” No again. “Then what’s the point of the plan? It’s holding us back. There must be a better way. Just go talk to the engineers.”
The Finland plan The plan that we ultimately presented to the board bore a close enough resemblance to a traditional business plan that the members departed the meeting satisfied that, yes, we have a business plan! Looking back now on that document, we are surprised in how many ways it was spot on. It was all about how Google would focus on its users and build excellent platforms and products. It said that Google would always offer higher-quality services and make those services easily accessible. It proposed that our foundation be built on users, and that more users would draw more advertisers. There were a few tactical points covering how we would fend off competitive threats, but basically the way to challenge Microsoft, we said, was to create great products. Which was, as it turned out, exactly the right thing to do.
Have you ever heard of Google Notebook? How about Knol? iGoogle? Wave? Buzz? PigeonRank?15 These were all Google products that, while they had some merit, never caught on with users. They weren’t good enough, and so they died a deserved death. The tailwind of Google’s marketing and PR engine and brand wasn’t nearly strong enough to overcome a headwind of mediocrity. 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.”
Product development has become a faster, more flexible process, where radically better products don’t stand on the shoulders of giants, but on the shoulders of lots of iterations. The basis for success then, and for continual product excellence, is speed. Unfortunately, like Jonathan’s failed gate-based product development framework, most management processes in place at companies today are designed with something else in mind. They were devised over a century ago, at a time when mistakes were expensive and only the top executives had comprehensive information, and their primary objectives are lowering risk and ensuring that decisions are made only by the few executives with lots of information. In this traditional command-and-control structure, data flows up to the executives from all over the organization, and decisions subsequently flow down. This approach is designed to slow things down, and it accomplishes the task very well. Meaning that at the very moment when businesses must permanently accelerate, their architecture is working against them.
Great companies such as IBM, General Electric, General Motors, and Johnson & Johnson offer management tracks for people with the greatest potential, whereby these stars rotate in and out of different roles every two years or so. But this approach emphasizes the development of management skills, not technical ones. As a result, most knowledge workers in traditional environments develop deep technical expertise but little breadth, or broad management expertise but no technical depth.
Their common characteristic is that they work hard and are willing to question the status quo and attack things differently. This is why they can have such an impact. It is also why they are uniquely difficult to manage, especially under old models, because no matter how hard you try, you can’t tell people like that how to think. 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.
Our friend Leslie Berlin, the Silicon Valley historian, was researching a biography on Intel cofounder Bob Noyce, and asked Steve during an interview why he had spent so much time with Noyce early in his career. “It’s like what Schopenhauer said about the conjurer,” Steve replied. He retrieved a book of essays by nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, and read her a passage from one with the chipper title of “On the Sufferings of the World”: “He who lives to see two or three generations is like a man who sits some time in the conjurer’s booth at a fair, and witnesses the performance twice or thrice in succession. The tricks were meant to be seen only once, and when they are no longer a novelty and cease to deceive, their effect is gone.”19 (We suspect that the ability to pull out a Schopenhauer quote during an interview was precisely one of those tricks.)
So just because you don’t have a hoodie and a seven-figure check from a venture capitalist, that doesn’t mean you can’t create the next big thing. All you need is the insight that your industry is transforming at a rapid pace, the guts to take a risk and be part of that transformation, and the willingness and ability to attract the best smart creatives and lead them to make it happen. Is that you? Are you ready? As Peter Drucker pointed out, the Egyptian who conceived and built the pyramids thousands of years ago was really just a very successful manager.21 The Internet Century brims with pyramids yet unbuilt. Let’s get started.
But it wasn’t Google’s culture that turned those five engineers into problem-solving ninjas who changed the course of the company over the weekend. Rather it was the culture that attracted the ninjas to the company in the first place. Many people, when considering a job, are primarily concerned with their role and responsibilities, the company’s track record, the industry, and compensation. Further down on that list, probably somewhere between “length of commute” and “quality of coffee in the kitchen,” comes culture. Smart creatives, though, place culture at the top of the list. To be effective, they need to care about the place they work. This is why, when starting a new company or initiative, culture is the most important thing to consider.
to helping that smart creative make the right call. What values would
by that company veteran whom everyone respects. For this employee—for all employees—those values should clearly and plainly outline the things that matter most to the company, the things you care about. Otherwise they are meaningless, and won’t be worth a damn
What values would you want that bleary-eyed employee to consider? Write them down in a simple, concise way. Then share them, not in posters and guides, but through constant, authentic communications. As former General Electric CEO Jack Welch said in Winning: “No vision is worth the paper it’s printed on unless it is communicated constantly and reinforced with rewards.”
As we write this today, the arcane details of that IPO a decade ago are a matter of history, but phrases like “long term focus,” “serving end users,” “don’t be evil,” and “making the world a better place” still describe how the company is run.
Google’s AdSense36 product, which developed into a multibillion-dollar business, was invented one day by a group of engineers from different teams who were playing pool in the office. Your partner or roommate is probably great, but the odds of the two of you coming up with a billion-dollar business during a coffee break at home are pretty small, even if you do have a pool table. Make your offices crowded and load them with amenities, then expect people to use them.
“Your title makes you a manager. Your people make you a leader.”
A lot of government websites are guilty of this. (TV remotes too. At least, that’s the only explanation we can conceive for why they are so horrible. Seriously, why is the mute button tiny and hidden, while the “on demand” button is big and a different color? Because the exec who runs the on-demand business unit has a number to hit, and no one gets paid when viewers mute ads.) You should never be able to reverse engineer a company’s organizational chart from the design of its product. Can you figure out who reigns supreme at Apple when you open the box for your new iPhone? Yes. It’s you, the customer; not the head of software, manufacturing, retail, hardware, apps, or the Guy Who Signs the Checks. That is exactly as it should be. Once you identify the people who have the biggest impact, give them more to do. When you pile more responsibility on your best people, trust that they will keep taking it on or tell you when enough is enough. As the old saying goes: If you want something done, give it to a busy person.
This isn’t Fun—it couldn’t possibly be created by fiat. It’s fun, and can only occur in a permissive environment that trusts its employees and doesn’t defer to the “what happens if this leaks?” worrywarts. It’s impossible to have too much of that kind of fun. The more you have, the more you get done.
Bet on technical insights that help solve a big problem in a novel way, optimize for scale, not for revenue, and let great products grow the market for everyone.
Since then, most of Google’s successful products have been based on strong technical insights, while most of the less successful ones lacked them. AdWords, the Google ads engine that generates most of the company’s revenue, was based on the insight that ads could be ranked and placed on a page based on their value as information to users, rather than just by who was willing to pay more.60 Google News, the site that aggregates news headlines from thousands of media outlets, was based on the insight that we could algorithmically group stories by topic, not source. Chrome, Google’s open-source browser, was founded on the insight that as websites grew more complex and powerful, browsers needed to be reengineered for speed. Pick an innovative, successful Google product, and you are likely to find at least one significant technical insight behind it, the sort of idea that could have appeared in a technical journal.
Excite@Home, where Jonathan ran the product team in the late ’90s, was a company founded on a set of technical insights that turned the coaxial cables carrying TV shows into people’s homes into broadband pipelines. The cable modem Excite@Home developed was a breakthrough product, but it ran headlong into an intractable enemy: market research. The cable operators had data showing that their customers mostly had personal computers (PCs) with Intel 80286 and 80386 processors, so Excite@Home’s modems needed to support those systems. But Excite@Home’s engineers knew that those older processors didn’t have the horsepower to do anything interesting with a broadband connection, and that customers with those computers who bought their service would have a bad experience. The cable operators pushed hard on this point, trying to force Excite@Home to offer a useless service for outmoded PCs because that is what their market research said to do. But the market research failed to see that PC performance was following Moore’s Law by doubling roughly every two years, and that pretty soon all those slow PCs would be gone.
When you base your product strategy on technical insights, you avoid me-too products that simply deliver what customers are asking for. (Henry Ford: “If I had listened to customers, I would have gone out looking for faster horses.”)65 That sort of incremental innovation can work very well for incumbents who are concerned with maintaining the status quo and quibbling over percentage points of market share. But if you are starting a new venture or trying to transform an existing enterprise, it’s not enough. Basing products on technical insights seems like a fairly obvious approach, but it is a lot more difficult to practice than to preach. Back in 2009, after we conducted the product review that demonstrated just how important it was to follow this strategy, we asked the product managers for all of our major products in the pipeline to describe in a few sentences the technical insight upon which they were building their plan. Some of them could, but many of them couldn’t. “What is your technical insight?” turns out to be an easy question to ask and a hard one to answer. So for your products, ask the question. If you can’t articulate a good answer, rethink the product.
Eric’s Notes for a Strategy Meeting We have spent countless hours working on strategy with our teams. This is an experience you will get to enjoy at some point, once you have gathered a coterie of smart creatives and are ready to write down the fundamentals of your new venture. So when you are on your way to that first strategy jam session, consider these pearls of (we hope) wisdom that we have collected from our own strategy sessions over the years, culled from conference-room whiteboards, Post-its stuck on walls, scribbled notes, and emails to ourselves. The right strategy has a beauty to it, a sense of many people and ideas working in concert to succeed. Start by asking what will be true in five years and work backward. Examine carefully the things you can assert will change quickly, especially factors of production where technology is exponentially driving down cost curves, or platforms that could emerge. In a five-year timeline there are disrupters—and opportunities—in many markets. What will be the disrupters affecting you? There is now almost perfect market information and broad availability of capital, so you need to win on product and platform. Spend the vast majority of your time thinking about product and platform. When there is disruption in a market, there are two possible scenarios. If you are the incumbent, you can acquire, build, or ignore a disruptive challenger. Ignoring the challenger will work for only a short while. If you opt to acquire or build, you must viscerally understand the technical insights and options the challenger will use to attack. If you are the challenger, you need to invent a new product and build a business around it, and understand the tools (business relationships, regulations, and lawsuits) and obstacles incumbents will use to stop you. Consider the role of other players whose incentives can be aligned to help you. Your strategy should include a way you can have people outside the existing business framework (division, company, team) thinking about innovation along with the people inside. Growth matters most. All big successes in the Internet Century will embody large platforms that get better and stronger as they grow. Articulate a rough time frame and the end point you want to achieve. Don’t use market research and competitive analyses. Slides kill discussion. Get input from everyone in the room. Iteration is the most important part of the strategy. It needs to be very, very fast and always based on learning. Many large, successful companies started with the following: 1. They solved a problem in a novel way. 2. They used that solution to grow and spread quickly. 3. That success was based largely on their products. And the coterie you gather to work on this strategy? Choose it wisely. It shouldn’t just comprise the people who have been around the longest or those with the biggest titles, rather it should include the best smart creatives and the ones who will have a good perspective on the changes to come.
Of course smart people know a lot and can therefore accomplish more than others less gifted. But hire them not for the knowledge they possess, but for the things they don’t yet know. Ray Kurzweil said that “information technology’s growing exponentially… And our intuition about the future is not exponential, it’s linear.”93 In our experience raw brainpower is the starting point for any exponential thinker. Intelligence is the best indicator of a person’s ability to handle change.
As important as character, though, is whether or not a candidate is interesting. Imagine being stuck at an airport for six hours with a colleague; Eric always chooses LAX for maximum discomfort (although Atlanta or London will do in a pinch). Would you be able to pass the time in a good conversation with him? Would it be time well spent, or would you quickly find yourself rummaging through your carry-on for your tablet so you can read your latest email or the news or anything to avoid having to talk to this dull person?
The loftier your hiring aspirations, the more challenging and important the interview process becomes. The interview is where you truly learn about a person—it is far more important than the résumé. The résumé tells you that the person got a 3.8 from an elite school while majoring in computer science and running track; the interview tells you that the person is a boring grind who hasn’t had an original idea in years.
Your objective is to find the limits of his capabilities, not have a polite conversation, but the interview shouldn’t be an overly stressful experience. The best interviews feel like intellectual discussions between friends (“What books are you reading right now?”). Questions should be large and complex, with a range of answers (to draw out the person’s thought process) that the interviewer can push back on (to see how the candidate stakes out and defends a position). It’s a good idea to reuse questions across candidates, so you can calibrate responses.
Get her to show off her thinking, not just her résumé. “What surprised you about…?” is one good way to approach this, as it is just different enough to surprise a candidate, so you don’t get rehearsed responses, and forces her to think about her experiences from a slightly different perspective.
“How did you pay for college?” is another good one, as is “If I were to look at the web history section of your browser, what would I learn about you that isn’t on your résumé?” Both of these can lead to a far better understanding of the candidate. They are also quite specific, which helps you gauge how well someone listens and parses questions.
To those critics, let us say once and for all: You are right. We want to hire the best minds available, because we believe there is a big difference between people who are great and those who are good, and we will do everything we can to separate the two. And if you, our critics, still persist in believing that elitism in hiring is wrong, well, we have just one question for you: If you have twelve coins, one of which is counterfeit and a different weight than the others, and a balance, how do you identify the counterfeit coin in just three weighings?107
Who decided that an interview should last an hour? Oftentimes, you walk into an interview and know within minutes that a person is wrong for the company and the job. Who says you have to spend the rest of the hour making useless conversation? What a waste of time. That’s why Google interviews are a half hour. Most interviews will result in a no-hire decision, so you want to invest less time in them, and most good interviewers can make that negative call in a half hour. If you like the candidate and want to keep talking, you can always schedule another interview or choose to make time in your calendar right then and there (easy to do if you have scheduled the following fifteen minutes to write up your feedback). The shorter interview time forces a conversation that’s more protein and less fat; there’s no time for small talk or meaningless questions.
Not only do most companies conduct overlong interviews, they conduct too many of them. One time, in our early days at Google, we interviewed a particular candidate over thirty times and we still couldn’t decide if we wanted to hire him. That’s just wrong. So we declared by fiat that a candidate couldn’t be interviewed more than thirty times. Then we did some research and discovered that each additional interviewer after the fourth increased our “decision accuracy” by less than 1 percent. In other words, after four interviews the incremental cost of conducting additional interviews outweighs the value the additional feedback contributes to the ultimate hiring decision. So we lowered the maximum to five, a number with the added benefit (at least for computer scientists) of being prime.
Smart creatives today may not share many characteristics with professional athletes, but they do share one important thing: the potential for disproportionate impact. Top performers get paid well in athletics, and they should in business too. If you want better performance from the best, celebrate and reward it disproportionately.
But what’s most important in the Internet Century is product excellence, so it follows that big rewards should be given to the people who are closest to great products and innovations. This means that yes, the lower-level employee who helps create a breakthrough product or feature should be very handsomely rewarded. Pay outrageously good people outrageously well, regardless of their title or tenure. What counts is their impact.
And of course, if it truly is in the best interest of the person to go, then let her go. As Reid Hoffman, Jonathan’s former colleague at Apple and founding CEO of LinkedIn notes, “Just because a job ends, your relationship with your employee doesn’t have to.… The first thing you should do when a valuable employee tells you he is leaving is try to change his mind. The second is congratulate him on the new job and welcome him to your company’s alumni network.”110
So always keep in mind, from the outset, that the best way to avoid having to fire underperformers is not to hire them. This is why we would rather our hiring process generate more false negatives (people we should have hired but didn’t) than false positives (we shouldn’t have hired, but did). Test yourself: If you could trade the bottom 10 percent of your team for new hires, would your organization improve? If so, then you need to look at the hiring process that yielded those low performers and see how you can improve it. Another test: Are there members of your team whom, if they told you they were leaving, you would not fight hard to keep? If there are employees you would let go, then perhaps you should.
Google’s Hiring Dos and Don’ts Hire people who are smarter and more knowledgeable than you are. Don’t hire people you can’t learn from or be challenged by. Hire people who will add value to the product and our culture. Don’t hire people who won’t contribute well to both. Hire people who will get things done. Don’t hire people who just think about problems. Hire people who are enthusiastic, self-motivated, and passionate. Don’t hire people who just want a job. Hire people who inspire and work well with others. Don’t hire people who prefer to work alone. Hire people who will grow with your team and with the company. Don’t hire people with narrow skill sets or interests. Hire people who are well rounded, with unique interests and talents. Don’t hire people who only live to work. Hire people who are ethical and who communicate openly. Don’t hire people who are political or manipulative. Hire only when you’ve found a great candidate. Don’t settle for anything less.
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 place? Keep thinking about that ideal job, and assess your strengths and weaknesses in light of it. What do you need to improve to get there? This step requires external input, so talk to your manager or peers and get their take on it. Finally, how will you get there? What training do you need? What work experience? By the way, if your conclusion is that you are ready for your ideal job today, then you aren’t thinking big enough. Start over and make that ideal job a stretch, not a gimme. If you follow these steps, it will work. If you don’t follow them, you will likely prove Yogi Berra’s point that “You’ve got to be careful if you don’t know where you’re going ’cause you might not get there.”
This is why most conference rooms at Google have two projectors. One of them is for videoconferencing with other offices or for projecting meeting notes. The other is for data. When discussing options and opinions, we start the meetings with data. We don’t seek to convince by saying “I think.” We convince by saying “Let me show you.”
Be especially aware of the quiet people; call on the ones who haven’t spoken up yet. They may be dissenters who are afraid to disagree with you in public (but need to get over that fear), or they may be of the shy but brilliant type. Or perhaps they truly have nothing to say, in which case maybe they shouldn’t be at the meeting in the first place. One technique is to throw out a few “stupid softballs” that let people dip their toe in the water of disagreeing with the boss. (“I think we should all pour hydrochloric acid on ourselves. Thoughts?”) Do your best to surface all potential dissent early in the process; there is a natural (and valid) bias toward rejecting dissent the later it surfaces in the decision-making process.
Above all it is solution-oriented: The right decision is the best decision, not the lowest common denominator decision upon which everyone agrees. And it’s not always your solution. As Coach Wooden once said, “Be interested in finding the best way, not in having your own way.”
There is a simple trick to getting this right. When ending a debate and making a decision that doesn’t have 100 percent support, remember these three words: “You’re both right.” To emotionally commit to a decision with which they don’t agree, people have to know that their opinion was not only heard, but valued. “You’re both right” accomplishes this. It tells the person whose argument lost that there are elements of truth amidst the rubble of their failed position. It provides an emotional boost—people like hearing that they are right. And fortunately, it is often true, since in a group of smart creatives there are usually elements of truth in everyone’s position. It’s rare for a good person to be completely, 100 percent wrong. Then,
Computer scientists hate inefficiency, so over the years Eric’s team developed a series of rules for meetings that we found to be quite effective: 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. Even if a meeting is not a decision-making meeting—for example it’s designed to share information or brainstorm solutions—it should have a clear owner. Again, that owner should ensure that the right people are invited to the meeting, that there’s a clear agenda, that the necessary prep work has been done in advance, and that action items are circulated promptly. Meetings are not like government agencies—they should be easy to kill. Any meeting should have a purpose, and if that purpose isn’t well defined or if the meeting fails to achieve that purpose, maybe the meeting should go away. The decision-maker needs to ask the hard questions: Is the meeting still useful? Is it too frequent / not frequent enough? Do people get the information they need? Meetings should be manageable in size. No more then eight people, ten at a stretch (but we would seriously discourage this). Everyone in the room should be able to give their input. If more people need to know the result of the meeting, make sure you have a process for communicating it rather than bringing them in as observers, which lowers the quality of the meeting and people’s ability to talk openly. Attendance at meetings is not a badge of importance. If you aren’t needed, leave, or better yet, excuse yourself ahead of time. This is especially true of meetings with customers or partners. Many times we have walked into an “intimate” meeting with a senior executive from one of our customers or partners, only to find the room full of people. We can’t help it if customers feel the need to bring their entire org chart to the meeting, but we try to control our side. Fewer people is almost always better. Timekeeping matters. Begin meetings on time. End them on time. Leave enough time at the end to summarize findings and action items. If the meeting has accomplished its goal before its allotted time runs out, then end it early. Remember, we are human: Schedule time for lunch and bio breaks, and be respectful of employees working in different time zones. They like to spend time with their families too. These common courtesies get forgotten too often. Paying attention to them will earn the respect of employees and colleagues. If you attend a meeting, attend the meeting. Multitasking doesn’t work. If you are in a meeting and using your laptop or phone for something not related to the meeting, it’s obvious your time is better spent elsewhere. Everyone attending a meeting should focus on the meeting, not other work. And if people have so many meetings that they can’t get work done, then there is a simple solution: Prioritize and go to fewer meetings. Among all of these rules, this last one has been the most challenging for us to implement. In our own team meetings, people so often ignored our edicts to close their laptops that we had to give up. But it’s still a good rule!
The backward-looking, risk-averse approach to the law, which is so common in corporate America, doesn’t work in the Internet Century, when business evolves at a pace that is several orders of magnitude faster than the pace of legal change. A smart creative–fueled business that is trying to innovate will be lucky to be right 50 percent of the time, which can be a problem for a lawyer whose risk tolerance is in the single digits.
One of the most important decisions any business leader makes is how to spend his or her time. When Eric became CEO of Novell in 1997, he got some great advice from Bill Gates: Spend 80 percent of your time on 80 percent of your revenue.
One of Eric’s most basic rules is sort of a golden rule for management: Make sure you would work for yourself. If you are so bad as a manager that you as a worker would hate working for you, then you have some work to do. The best tool we have found for this is the self-review: At least once per year, write a review of your own performance, then read it and see if you would work for you. And then, share it with the people who do in fact work for you. This will elicit greater insights than the standard 360-degree review process, because when you are initiating criticism of yourself it gives others the freedom to be more honest.
Communication in the Internet Century usually means using email, and email, despite being remarkably useful and powerful, often inspires momentous dread in otherwise optimistic, happy humans. Here are our personal rules for mitigating that sense of foreboding: 1. Respond quickly. There are people who can be relied upon to respond promptly to emails, and those who can’t. Strive to be one of the former. Most of the best—and busiest—people we know act quickly on their emails, not just to us or to a select few senders, but to everyone. Being responsive sets up a positive communications feedback loop whereby your team and colleagues will be more likely to include you in important discussions and decisions, and being responsive to everyone reinforces the flat, meritocratic culture you are trying to establish. These responses can be quite short—“got it” is a favorite of ours. And when you are confident in your ability to respond quickly, you can tell people exactly what a non-response means. In our case it’s usually “got it and proceed.” Which is better than what a non-response means from most people: “I’m overwhelmed and don’t know when or if I’ll get to your note, so if you needed my feedback you’ll just have to wait in limbo a while longer. Plus I don’t like you.” 2. When writing an email, every word matters, and useless prose doesn’t. Be crisp in your delivery. If you are describing a problem, define it clearly. Doing this well requires more time, not less. You have to write a draft then go through it and eliminate any words that aren’t necessary. Think about the late novelist Elmore Leonard’s response to a question about his success as a writer: “I leave out the parts that people skip.”147 Most emails are full of stuff that people can skip. 3. Clean out your inbox constantly. How much time do you spend looking at your inbox, just trying to decide which email to answer next? How much time do you spend opening and reading emails that you have already read? Any time you spend thinking about which items in your inbox you should attack next is a waste of time. Same with any time you spend rereading a message that you have already read (and failed to act upon). When you open a new message, you have a few options: Read enough of it to realize that you don’t need to read it, read it and act right away, read it and act later, or read it later (worth reading but not urgent and too long to read at the moment). Choose among these options right away, with a strong bias toward the first two. Remember the old OHIO acronym: Only Hold It Once. If you read the note and know what needs doing, do it right away. Otherwise you are dooming yourself to rereading it, which is 100 percent wasted time. If you do this well, then your inbox becomes a to-do list of only the complex issues, things that require deeper thought (label these emails “take action,” or in Gmail mark them as starred), with a few “to read” items that you can take care of later. To make sure that the bloat doesn’t simply transfer from your inbox to your “take action” folder, you must clean out the action items every day. This is a good evening activity. Zero items is the goal, but anything less than five is reasonable. Otherwise you will waste time later trying to figure out which of the long list of things to look at. 4. Handle email in LIFO order (Last In First Out). Sometimes the older stuff gets taken care of by someone else. 5. Remember, you’re a router. When you get a note with useful information, consider who else would find it useful. At the end of the day, make a mental pass through the mail you received and ask yourself, “What should I have forwarded but didn’t?” 6. When you use the bcc (blind copy) feature, ask yourself why. The answer is almost always that you are trying to hide something, which is counterproductive and potentially knavish in a transparent culture. When that is your answer, copy the person openly or don’t copy them at all. The only time we recommend using the bcc feature is when you are removing someone from an email thread. When you “reply all” to a lengthy series of emails, move the people who are no longer relevant to the thread to the bcc field, and state in the text of the note that you are doing this. They will be relieved to have one less irrelevant note cluttering up their inbox. 7. Don’t yell. If you need to yell, do it in person. It is FAR TOO EASY to do it electronically. 8. Make it easy to follow up on requests. When you send a note to someone with an action item that you want to track, copy yourself, then label the note “follow up.” That makes it easy to find and follow up on the things that haven’t been done; just resend the original note with a new intro asking “Is this done?” 9. Help your future self search for stuff. If you get something you think you may want to recall later, forward it to yourself along with a few keywords that describe its content. Think to yourself, How will I search for this later? Then, when you search for it later, you’ll probably use those same search terms. This isn’t just handy for emails, but important documents too. Jonathan scans his family’s passports, licenses, and health insurance cards and emails them to himself along with descriptive keywords. Should any of those things go missing during a
1:1s—match the lists Bill Campbell once suggested to us an interesting approach to organizing 1:1s (aka one-on-ones, the periodic meetings between manager and employee). The manager should write down the top five things she wants to cover in the meeting, and the employee should do the same. When the separate lists are revealed, chances are that at least some of the items overlap. The mutual objective of any 1:1 meeting should be to solve problems, and if a manager and employee can’t independently identify the same top problems that they should solve together, there are even bigger problems afoot. Bill also suggests a nice format for 1:1s, which we have adopted with good results: 1. Performance on job requirements a. Could be sales figures b. Could be product delivery or product milestones c. Could be customer feedback or product quality d. Could be budget numbers 2. Relationship with peer groups (critical for company integration and cohesiveness) a. Product and Engineering b. Marketing and Product c. Sales and Engineering 3. Management/Leadership a. Are you guiding/coaching your people? b. Are you weeding out the bad ones? c. Are you working hard at hiring? d. Are you able to get your people to do heroic things? 4. Innovation (Best Practices) a. Are you constantly moving ahead… thinking about how to continually get better? b. Are you constantly evaluating new technologies, new products, new practices? c. Do you measure yourself vs. the best in the industry/world?
For something to be innovative, it needs to be new, surprising, and radically useful.
Many years ago, one of our colleagues, Udi Manber, was an engineer at Yahoo when the company decided it wasn’t innovative enough. So its executives did what any well-trained MBA types would do when faced with a problem: They put someone in charge of fixing it. They offered the job of head of innovation to Udi and he accepted, but three weeks into his stint he realized he had made a mistake. His bosses wanted him to set up an innovation council, with forms that employees could use to submit ideas and a process for the council to review and approve those ideas. In other words, Udi’s job was to set up an innovation bureaucracy. That’s pretty much an oxymoron. So instead, he left the company.
The idea of imbuing one top executive with responsibility for all things innovative isn’t unique to this one company. A few years ago, a major consulting firm published a report advising all companies to appoint such a “Chief Innovation Officer.”157 Why? Allegedly, to establish a “uniformity of command” over all the innovation programs. We’re not sure what that means, but we’re pretty sure that “uniformity of command” and “innovation” don’t belong in the same sentence (unless it’s the one you’re reading right now).
But innovation stubbornly resists traditional, MBA-style management tactics. Unlike most other things in business, it cannot be owned, mandated, or scheduled. As Udi told us when recounting his Yahoo experience, “Innovative people do not need to be told to do it, they need to be allowed to do it.” In other words, innovation has to evolve organically. It is the final destination of a path that starts when ideas spawn like mutations from a primordial ooze and traverse a long, perilous route from inception to fruition. Along the way, stronger ideas accumulate believers and momentum, and weaker ones fall to the wayside. There is no process by which to implement this evolution; its defining characteristic is its lack of process.
The obvious benefit of thinking big is that it gives smart creatives much more freedom. It removes constraints and spurs creativity. Astro Teller, the head of Google[x], notes that if you want to create a car that gets 10 percent better mileage, you just have to tweak the current design, but if you want to get one that gets five hundred miles per gallon, you need to start over. Just the thought process—How would I start over?—can spur ideas that were previously not considered.
It can also be easier to take on big problems because bigger challenges attract big talent. There is a symbiotic relationship between big challenges and highly smart, skilled people: The challenges get solved and the people get happy. Give the wrong people a big challenge, and you’ll induce anxiety. But give it to the right people, and you’ll induce joy.
First, a good OKR marries the big-picture objective with a highly measurable key result. It’s easy to set some amorphous strategic goal (make usability better… improve team morale… get in better shape) as an objective and then, at quarter end, declare victory. But when the strategic goal is measured against a concrete goal (increase usage of features by X percent… raise employee satisfaction scores by Y percent… run a half marathon in under two hours), then things get interesting. For example, one of our platform team’s recent OKRs was to have “new WW systems serving significant traffic for XX large services with latency < YY microseconds @ ZZ% on Jupiter.”174 (Jupiter is a code name, not the location of Google’s newest data center.)
When you want to spur innovation, the worst thing you can do is overfund it. As Frank Lloyd Wright once observed, “The human race built most nobly when limitations were greatest.”
The program doesn’t mean that the campus turns into summer camp every Friday, with all the engineers goofing off in (hopefully) creative ways. In fact, 20 percent time is more like 120 percent time, since it often occurs on nights and weekends. But it can also be stored up and used all at once—Jonathan had one product manager take a summer to work on a 20 percent project. Regardless of when you take your 20 percent time, assuming it doesn’t get in the way of doing your regular job, no one can stop you from doing it. Twenty percent time is a check and balance on imperial managers, a way to give people permission to work on stuff they aren’t supposed to work on. It helps bring to life the Steve Jobs maxim that “you have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy.”183 And we have found that when you trust people with freedom, they generally do not waste it on extravagant pies in the sky. You don’t get software engineers writing operas—they write code.
Hey, finance, your traffic is dropping this quarter and you’re behind on your objectives. No problem, we’ll pop you to the top of the page! Excite used data to determine which of the content areas were losers, but rather than starving those sections and forcing them to improve, they fed them by giving them better real estate. In retrospect, Excite’s mantra wasn’t so much to focus on its users as it was to focus its users on its worst products so it could meet its artificial objectives. Which, as it turned out, didn’t Excite anyone.
As Jeff Bezos points out, “Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue. At Amazon we like things to work in five to seven years. We’re willing to plant seeds, let them grow—and we’re very stubborn. We say we’re stubborn on vision and flexible on details.”
Start by asking what could be true in five years. Larry Page often says that the job of a CEO is not only to think about the core business, but also the future; most companies fail because they get too comfortable doing what they have always done, making only incremental changes. And that is especially fatal today, when technology-driven change is rampant. So the question to ask isn’t what will be true, but what could be true. Asking what will be true entails making a prediction, which is folly in a fast-moving world.205 Asking what could be true entails imagination: What thing that is unimaginable when abiding by conventional wisdom is in fact imaginable?
As Vinod Khosla points out, in 1980 it was hard to imagine that microprocessors would be everywhere, not just in computers but in cars, toothbrushes, and just about everything else.206 In 1990, when cellular telephones were the size of a sewing machine and cost a fortune, it was hard to imagine they would be smaller than a deck of cards and cost less than a night at the movies. In 1995, it was hard to imagine that the Internet would have over three billion users and over sixty trillion unique addresses. Microprocessors, mobile phones, and the Internet are all ubiquitous today, but virtually no one predicted that when they were in their incipient stages. And yet we all keep making the mistake: The general reaction when Google’s self-driving car was announced was incredulity. Cars that drive themselves couldn’t actually happen, could it? We can’t imagine it not happening. So forgo conventional wisdom, crank up that imagination, and ask yourself what could happen in your industry in the next five years. What could change most quickly, and what will not change at all? Then once you have an idea of what the future could hold, here are some more hard questions to consider. How would a very smart, well-capitalized competitor attack the company’s core business? How could it take advantage of digital platforms to exploit weaknesses or skim off the most profitable customer segments? What is the company doing to disrupt its own business? Is cannibalization or revenue loss a frequent reason to kill off potential innovation? Is there an opportunity to build a platform that can offer increasing returns and value as usage grows? Do company leaders use your products regularly? Do they love them? Would they give them to a spouse as a gift? (This obviously isn’t applicable in a lot of cases, but it’s a powerful thought experiment.) Do your customers love your products? Or are they locked in by other factors that might evaporate in the future? If they weren’t locked in at all, what would happen? (Interesting corollary to this question: If you forced your product people to make it easy for customers to ditch your product for a competitor’s, how would they react? Could they make your products so great that customers want to stay, even if they don’t have to?) When you go through your pipeline of upcoming new major products and features, what percentage of them are built on unique technical insights? How many product people are on the senior leadership team? Does the company aggressively reward and promote the people who have the biggest impact on creating excellent products? Is hiring a top priority at the C-suite level? Do top executives actually spend time on it? Among your stronger employees, how many see themselves at the company in three years? How many would leave for a 10 percent raise at another company? Do your decision-making processes lead to the best decisions, or the most acceptable ones? How much freedom do employees have? If there is someone who is truly innovative, does that person have the freedom to act on his ideas, regardless of his level? Are decisions on new ideas based on product excellence, or profit? Who does better in the company, information hoarders or routers? Do silos prevent the free flow of information and people? These are tough questions, and there are likely no obvious solutions to the problems they spotlight. But there certainly won’t be solutions if the questions never get asked. Incumbents usually fail to understand how quickly they can be disrupted, but asking these questions can help them discover the reality. It is also a great way to attract and invigorate the best smart creatives, who are drawn not only to the challenge, but to the honesty of the challenge. “Thank god, someone around here is finally asking the tough questions!” they will say. “Now we can get started on finding the answers.”
A digital infrastructure is a must-have, as is an immigration-friendly policy. Most important, though, is the freedom to innovate. Regulations get created in anticipation of problems, but if you build a system that anticipates everything, there’s no room to innovate. Furthermore, incumbents have a big influence