Authors: Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg
My recommendation: 5/5
Summary
A very interesting peak into the world of Google and how one of the world’s most successful companies operates.
My Takeaways
- Google hires “smart creatives” that love to learn.
- Product excellence is essential in today’s world because the cost of experimentation and failure has dropped significantly.
- The basis for continual product success is speed.
- Google employees are encouraged to try new things and fail.
- According to Google, the primary objective of any business must be to increase the speed of the product development process and the quality of output.
- Let data decide deductions, but don’t let it take over.
- Google sets a collaborative company culture. Who do we want to be? What do we believe?
- Decide your company culture before you get started.
- Offices should be designed to maximize energy and interactions. Not for isolation and status.
- Quality of the idea matters.
- Flat organizations are better for communication.
- Focus on great products.
- Small teams using the “two pizza rule.”
- Most of Google’s successful products have been based on strong technological insights. Google asks what are the technological insights upon which new features products and platforms will be built? Technological insight is something that either decreases the cost or increases the function and usability by a significant factor.
- Another source of technology insights is to start with a solution with a narrow problem and look for ways to broaden its scope.
- Build platforms that focus on growth.
- Open platforms trades control for scale and innovation.
- Don’t follow competition. If you follow competition, you will never deliver something that is truly innovative.
- Strategy Session: Ask what will be true in 5 years and work backward. Carefully examine the things you can assert will change quickly. Especially areas of production where technology is exponentially driving down the cost curves or platforms that could emerge.
- Identify the disrupters over a 5-year period.
- Spend the vast majority thinking about product and platform.
- Don’t use market research. Slides kill discussion.
- Hiring is the single most important thing you can do.
- Favoring specialization over intelligence is exactly the wrong approach in the technology industry.
- Every employee should recruit great people, so make it part of performance reviews and grading.
- Google creates new positions within the company to keep employees happy. They also pay well for outstanding employees who contribute.
- Google encourages job movement within the organization.
- Google relies heavily on data to drive presentations and visions.
- Google encourages dissent and different view points at meetings.
- Google has a bias for action that incorporates patience, information and alternatives.
- Every year, Google shares critical company info with all it’s employees at every level (slide presentations) that was presented to the board of directors
- Every entry-level employee understands the details of each person’s job. Not a hands off approach.
- Tell the truth.
- Google does a postmortem after product releases to go over what went right and wrong. Opens up honest communication and then posts it on the company’s private intranet.
- Press interviews are conversations not scripted answers.
- For something to be innovative, it needs to be new, surprising, and radically useful.
- Think big and 10x your ideas.
- Constantly ship and iterate your product.
- Pour resources into the winning products, not the losers.