Work Rules!: Insights From Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live And Lead Quotes
"Every great tale starts with an origin story."
"We humans live through narrative, viewing history through a lens of stories that we tell ourselves."
"My rebelliousness, I think, came out of being born in Moscow."
"Quixotic as it sounds, they both wanted to create a company where work was meaningful, employees felt free to pursue their passions, and people and their families were cared for."
"The kind of workman who gives the business the best that is in him is the best kind of workman a business can have."
"The most useful Web pages would have lots of links from other sites, because people would link only to the most useful pages."
"Building an exceptional team or institution starts with a founder."
"Our employees, who have named themselves Googlers, are everything."
"All successful organizations resemble one another as well. They possess a shared sense not just of what they produce, but of who they are and want to be."
"If you give people freedom, they will amaze you."
"Hiring is the most important people function you have, and most of us aren't as good at it as we think."
"Only hire people who are better than you."
"The lesson of 'The Talent Myth' was not 'Don’t hire smart people.' It was 'Don’t hire exclusively for smarts.'"
"Once it’s explained, it seems self-evident. But how many of us have taken the time to look for the deeper meaning in our work?"
"A top-notch engineer is worth three hundred times or more than an average engineer."
"What matters is what you bring to the company and how you’ve distinguished yourself."
"Every person I’ve hired is better than me in some meaningful way."
"The broad scope of our mission allows Google to move forward by steering with a compass rather than a speedometer."
"But in 2010, our analyses revealed that academic performance didn’t predict job performance beyond the first two or three years after college, so we stopped requiring grades and transcripts except from recent graduates."
"The hiring machine was overly conservative by design. It focused on avoiding false positives—the people who looked good in the interview process but actually would not perform well—because we would rather have missed hiring two great performers if it meant we would also avoid hiring a lousy one."
"A small company can’t afford to hire someone who turns out to be awful. Bad performers and political people have a toxic effect on an entire team and require substantial management time to coach or exit."
"It’s rare among start-ups for early hires to persist this long, and even rarer for them to be able to continue growing personally and professionally as the company scales from tens of people to tens of thousands."
"We’re a medium-size company in terms of employee count. We have tens of thousands of employees. There are organizations out there that have millions of employees. That’s a factor of a hundred, basically."
"Our mandate was to hire as many bright people as we could, so we kept adding hundreds and hundreds of recruiters and taking more and more Googler time."
"It turned out that nobody was meaningfully motivated by the referral bonus. When I asked Googlers why they referred their friends and colleagues to Google, I was floored by the strength of their responses."
"A referral bonus is an extrinsic motivator, meaning that it is motivation that comes from outside yourself."
"The very best people aren’t out there looking for work. Great-performing people are happy and being amply rewarded where they are today."
"Using a homegrown product called gHire, a candidate database we’ve built and enhanced with a variety of tools for sifting through and tracking candidates, hundreds of brilliant recruiters find and cultivate these individuals over time—sometimes over years."
"Even information that an individual may have put on the Internet and then deleted can sometimes still be found."
"Our hypothesis is that, since Google is fairly well known today, a more motivated candidate will show the modest initiative required to actually go to Google Careers and apply directly."
"We learned billboards don’t work because we tried one."
"Unstructured interviews have an r2 of 0.14, meaning that they can explain only 14 percent of an employee’s performance."
"Interviews are awkward because you’re having an intimate conversation with someone you just met, and the candidate is in a very vulnerable position."
"If you’re committed to transforming your team or your organization, hiring better is the single best way to do it."
"Set a high bar for quality. Before you start recruiting, decide what attributes you want and define as a group what great looks like."
"But if you have opinions, we’re gonna use mine."
"Relying on data—evidence—to guard against rumor, bias, and plain old wrongheadedness."
"But by far the best recruiting technique is having a core of remarkable people."
"Every office, every team, every project is an opportunity to run an experiment and learn from it."
"A core belief of 3M is that creativity needs freedom."
"If you’re not careful, you may learn something before you’re done."
"The most talented and creative people can’t be forced to work."
"Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they’re yours."
"Expect little from people, get little. Expect a lot, and you might just get a lot."
"The truth is that people usually live up to your expectations, whether those expectations are high or low."
"The mistake leaders make is that they manage too much."
"If you want your car to get fifty miles per gallon, fine. You can retool your car a little bit. But if I tell you it has to run on a gallon of gas for five hundred miles, you have to start over."
"The power of calibration in assessing people for ratings is not that different from the power of having people compare notes after interviewing candidates."
"The Lisa Simpson in all of us wants to be evaluated because she wants to be the best. She wants to grow. All you have to do is tell her how."
"Most organizations undervalue and underreward their best people, without even knowing they are doing it."
"If you believe people are fundamentally good and worthy of trust, you must be honest and transparent with them."
"People either improve dramatically or they leave and succeed elsewhere."
"The biggest opportunities lie in your absolute worst and best employees."
"Engineers generally think managers are at best a necessary evil, but mainly they get in the way, create bureaucracy, and screw things up."
"We saw this problem in our recruiting as well, particularly outside the United States."
"Everyone has an idea of what a good or bad manager is, but it’s a subjective standard."
"The key was to really understand the best of the best and the worst of the worst."
"Googlers with the best managers did 5 to 18 percent better on a dozen Googlegeist dimensions when compared to those managed by the worst manager."
"Teams working for the best managers also performed better and had lower turnover."
"Fortunately, we didn’t need to. Googlers ran the experiment for us by switching teams."
"So managers did matter. And not only that, but amazing managers mattered a lot."
"We now had a prescription for building great managers."
"For Google, the result has been a steady improvement in manager quality."
"But we rarely think about how to learn most effectively."
"Why then is so much invested in corporate learning, with so little return?"
"But if we could reduce good management to a checklist, we wouldn’t need to invest millions of dollars in training."
"Pay unfairly: Your best people are better than you think, and worth more than you pay them."
"Celebrate accomplishment, not compensation."
"But we intend to be different. That is why we developed the Founders’ Award program over the past quarter."
"The Founders’ Award is designed to give extraordinary rewards for extraordinary team accomplishments."
"Compensation systems are based on imperfect information and administered by imperfect people. They will inevitably have some errors and injustice in the margins."
"Fairness perceptions are very powerful. They affect how people think about almost everything at work, but especially how valued they think they are, how satisfied they are with their jobs, how much they trust their supervisors, and their commitment to the organization."
"The biggest thing I learned fromworkingasacommercialfishermanwhenIwastwenty−threefrom working as a commercial fisherman when I was twenty-threefromworkingasacommercialfishermanwhenIwastwenty−three was that hard work doesn’t always pay off. If you work on the wrong thing, it doesn’t really matter how hard you work, because it’s not going to make a difference."
"Cash is evaluated on a cognitive level. A cash award is valued by calculating how it compares to your current salary, or to what you could buy with it."
"We’re not very good at predicting what will make us happy, or how happy it will make us."
"Recognizing this, or more precisely, having learned this lesson the hard way, we revamped our reward programs."
"It’s essential that extreme reward systems have both distributive and procedural justice."
"The simplicity of the design is part of the magic."
"Simple, public recognition is one of the most effective and most underutilized management tools."
"Trust your people enough to let them recognize each other."
"Put simply, because many professionals are almost always successful at what they do, they rarely experience failure. And because they have rarely failed, they have never learned how to learn from failure."
"It’s vital they master geometry, algebra one, and algebra two, but it’s just as important that they respond to failure by trying again instead of giving up."
"Swallow hard and pay unfairly. Have wide variations in pay that reflect the power law distribution of performance."
"Most of the programs we use to delight and care for Googlers are free, or very close to it."
"Most companies want workers to be efficient. Google is no different."
"A sense of community helps people do their best work just as surely as increasing efficiency does by sweeping away minor chores and distractions."
"Google isn’t some sweetly baited trap designed to trick people into staying at the office working all the time."
"If your goals are ambitious and crazy enough, even failure will be a pretty good achievement."
"Every dollar of savings will feel like a trade-off. It is never easy. It is always worth it."
"If you believe human beings are fundamentally good, act like it."
"A bad hire is toxic, not only destroying their own performance, but also dragging down the performance, morale, and energy of those around them."
"Make developmental conversations safe and productive by having them all the time."
"The more specific you can be in slicing expertise, the easier it will be to study your stars and discern why they are more successful than others."
"Save your big checks for the times when your people are most in need, the moments of greatest tragedy and joy."
"Ninety percent or more of the value on your teams comes from the top 10 percent."
"We are all constantly nudged by our environment and nudging those around us. Use that fact to make yourself and your teams happier and more productive."
"If being down a person means everyone else has to work harder in the short term, just remind them of the last jerk they had to work with."
"Building a great culture and environment requires constant learning and renewal."