Why this Book: Suggested to me by my friend Jay as a good book to read with some others at work.

Summary in 3 sentences: From his perspective as Google’s head of People Operations  (traditionally known as HR) Lazlo Bock describes the culture at Google, how they created it, how they sustain it.   He argues that getting and keeping the best people is the foundation of a great culture, so he begins by offering extensive insights into Google’s hiring practices, and then moves on to how they changed management practices to keep those great people happy, engaged, and productive.  He concludes with chapters on new ideas for retaining great people and keeping the culture alive, as they encounter new problems that arise out of such a different approach to culture and decision making.

My  Impressions:  This is a really good look at what a key insider sees as the fundamentals of the Google culture. But betware – it is nearly 400 pages long and is loaded with content.  Not  a quick read.  This book is Lazlo Bock’s story about the (mostly) good sides of the Google culture – how Google has become a leader in creativity and innovation,  with bright and engaged employees taking it to amazing success in the market place, making a huge impact on the world.   It has been ranked many times in many surveys as the best place to work.  They have created an almost cult-like culture – which has its downsides as well.

Bock does include a chapter entitled “It’s not all Rainbows and Unicorns”  in which he points out a number of problems, mistakes and challenges they’ve had in creating and sustaining their culture.  He gives short case studies of how well-intentioned ideas went awry, and describes some of the challenges they have faced in sustaining a culture that offers very intelligent people a lot of freedom, and how this can lead to a self-righteous sense of entitlement – each person or group expecting to have things just their way.   Many of these are VERY different from my experience in the military.

He does not address the case of James Damore which occurred after Work Rules was published. James Damore is the Google engineer who was dismissed for allegedly questioning the culture of political correctness and pressure within Goolgle to believe in a particular set of social and political beliefs.  It is a damning story that has gotten a lot of publicity. According to an article in Wired Magazine Damore is now filing a law suit claiming discrimination against white males and conservatives.

The first part of Work Rules describes their philosophy, shares details and protocols for hiring the right people – which according to Bock, is the most important aspect of building and sustaining a great company and culture.  “If you’re committed to transforming your team or your organization, hiring better is the single best way to do it. Its takes will and patience, but it works.  Be willing to concentrate your your people-investment on hiring. And never settle. ” 115

In the second part of the book, he describes how Google has “upended” traditional management practices, by changing the role of managers.  They don’t have nearly the authority that managers have in other companies. Many decisions that would normally be an individual manager’s prerogative (hiring, bonuses, promotions, many key decisions) are made by committee – in order to protect the values of the organization, to get organizational buy-in to such decisions, and to prevent any one person’s agenda from working against the purpose and culture of Google.  Managers exist to serve their employees, and Google’s managerial protocols reinforce that.

He addresses the challenges Google has had of holding on to their key cultural values and qualities  as the size of the company has continued to grow, and he shares different ideas they’ve tried to hold on to their values and sense of who they were during a phase of very rapid expansion – some of which worked, some didn’t.

His chapter  “Building a Learning Institution” overturns the traditional 70-20-10 rule that HR programs normally prescribe for learning within an organization: 70% of employee learning takes place on the job, 20% from coaching, 10%  in the classroom.  Google prefers a different model which measures training effectiveness, based on: Reaction– students reaction to the training; Learning – assess the change in the student’s knowledge or attitude; Behavior – to what extent do students change their behavior as a result of the training; and Results – measure whether the training yields any measurable results.  p 220-222  He points out how the vast majority of corporate training is ineffective -it doesn’t target the right people, is unclear on objectives, and has few if any longitudinal metrics to determine effect or value of the training.

HIs chapter entitled “Nudge” was one of my favorites.  It is based on a concept in the book Nudge, by Thaler and Sunstein, which defines a nudge as “any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significant changing their economic incentives… Nudges are about influencing choices.” He offers numerous fascinating examples of how Google and other companies have influenced their people to make choices that are good for them as well as the organization, by simply tweaking the environment or how options are presented.  It’s a classic model of positively influencing people WITHOUT being heavy-handed, or taking away people’s freedom to make other (stupid, uninformed, or unhealthy) personal decisions.

In his chapter “Pay unfairly” – he redefines “fairness.”  Pay he says, should not be associated with job description or title, longevity, background, race, gender, creed, or anything other than performance. Fairness in pay should be commensurate with contribution.  They fine-tuned their extrinsic rewards into four principles:

1. Pay unfairly – pay primarily according to contribution,
2. Celebrate accomplishment, not compensation – reward with great experiences, not just cash.
3. Make it easy to spread the love – give lots of public recognition for good work and behavior.
4. Reward thoughtful failure – reward considered risk taking.

There is a chapter “The Best Things in Life are Free (or Almost Free) about how they make life easier on their employees by offering free or nearly free services on their work site – to dramatically reduce the time it takes to do these things in their off-time.  Such things as car washes, laundry facilities, ATMs on site create a sense of community in the work place. AND they make it easier to spend more time at work.

In his pen-ultimate chapter he offers a summary of the entire book by distilling the preceding 13 chapters in the book into the ten steps that will transform your team or workplace. And for each of these, he gives a brief summary of the key point supporting each recommendation (p 340-348):

1. Give your work meaning
2. Trust your people
3. Hire only people who are better than you
4. Don’t confuse development with managing performance
5. Focus on the two tails (your best and worst people)
6. Be frugal and generous
7. Pay unfairly
8. Nudge
9. Manage the rising expectations
10. Enjoy! And then go back to No. 1 and start again.

He concludes the book with a great and much needed chapter entitled “Afterword for HR Geeks Only: Building the World’s First People Operations Team – The blueprint for a new kind of HR.”  He distills and shapes the insights of his book into practical guidance for HR professionals – should they want to transform their HR department into something truly revolutionary.  There are some great points and ideas in here. He offers up 4 principles and elaborates on each one:

1. Strive for Nirvana,
2. Use data to predict and shape the future;
3. Improve relentlessly; 4.
4. Field an unconventional team.

This is a long book filled with great content.  I’m just afraid many people won’t make it through the entire book.  I have suggest to my friends – who are mostly in the leadership/management field – to start at the back of the book, begin with chapter 14, and read forward until and through chapter 8. Then I suggest they read the last couple of pages of the first 7 chapters, to determine which chapters they want to spend more time with.  This book is worth the effort.

NOTE – the extensive material below is for my benefit, to help me when I refer back to this book in coaching, consulting, or in a leadership reading group.  You are welcomed to it as well. 

MY KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. The incredible amount of time and energy they put into hiring. Not just HR, but the whole organization and especially leaders.  They have a process that reinforces their value of curiosity and desire to learn, and their belief in experimentation and data.  Their hiring process seeks people with the right cultural fit more so than people with the right previous experience.  And this takes time – the hiring process can take months.  Google keeps records on those they like but miss or can’t hire, so that they can recruit them later.  They endeavor to make their hiring process a positive experience for all who enter it, whether they get hired or not. They recognize that most applicants are very talented people who they hope will be ambassadors and allies in other companies
2. Group decisions keep the culture at the forefront. They have reduced individual managers’ prerogatives, which reinforces the team aspect of Google. It also ensures that there is a consensus on the impact key decisions will have on their cultural.  These include key people decisions:  Hiring, firing, and promotions.
3. How divisive performance management systems can become. They researched what other organizations have tried and tried a number of different approaches themselves. They found simpler is better. The Navy has found that to be the case as well.
4. An organization should separate “performance evaluation” from “developmental counseling” noting that if there is any tension in the performance counseling, it usually over-rides the developmental counseling. Obviously the two are related, but they shouldn’t be combined.
5. Getting your best people to be teachers. This reinforces the idea Chris Fussell suggested in One Mission that leaders should find their “positive deviants” and give them more responsibility. Bock recommends making them your internal consultants, and to reduce the hiring of outside consultants.  A couple of years ago, I read an HBR article which recommends exactly the same thing.
6. Focusing on the worst and the best people in the organization. He talks about creating opportunities for the relatively poor performers to feel valued and to improve – and of course he recognizes that this doesn’t always work.  The best performers need to be retained and their talent needs to contribute appropriately to the organization.  Google says that one great engineer is worth 300 average engineers.  Gotta keep that great engineer engaged and contributing.
7. Nudging – not shoving – people into making the right choices is clever and effective. I loved the chapter on Nudging – how nudges seek to influence people to choose, rather than telling them what to choose.  To “nudge” means to design the environment with structures that influence people to make good decisions, without forcing them to – especially to improve health and wealth – without limiting freedom.
8. Decision making always defaults to data and metrics – and a bias for experimenting to see what works. Opinions are interesting, but data is taken seriously.  There is a strong culture of experimentation, which regards failure differently than a culture of success.  Failure is not treated as a “failure” – it is treated as an experiment that was necessary to get to greater success later. What were the metrics? How do we capture the data?
9. Upward Feedback Surveys provide opportunity for subordinates to provide anonymous feedback to their managers. Probably not as good as 360 surveys, but a good step on helping leaders improve.
10. Most corporate training programs are largely ineffective. They are insufficiently targeted, delivered by the wrong people, and measured incorrectly.

 Below are some of my notes on key points and quotes from the book (page numbers from the 2015 Hardback edition):

• Google takes away many traditional individual manager authorities and assigns them to groups of managers, such as hiring and firing, performance rating, promotions, when a product is ready for launch.  What’s left for the manager?  “Managers serve the team.” 13
• Employees must choose whether they want to be a founder or an employee. It’s not a question of literal ownership.  It’s a question of attitude.  27
• Fun is an outcome of who we are, rather than the defining characteristic. 32
• The broad scope of our mission is to move worward by steering with a compass rather than a speedometer.  34
• Having workers meet the people they are helping is the greatest motivator, even if they don’y meet for a few minutes. 39
• If you believe people are good, you must be unafraid to share information with them.  41
•  At our weekly TGIF all-ands meeting ….The Q&A is the part that matters most.
• The benefit of so much openness is that everyone in the company knows what’s going on.
• If you’re an organization that  says, “Our people are our greatest asset” (as most do), and you mean it, you must default to open.
• Culture matters most when it is tested.
• If you give people freedom, they will amaze you.51
• We enjoy a constant paranoia about losing the culture and a constant, creeping sense of dissatisfaction with the current culture.  This is a good sign! This feeling of teetering on the brink of losing our culture causes people to be vigilant about threats to it. I’d be concerned if people stopped worrying.  52
• Over the coming decades, the most gifted, hardest-working people on the planet will gravitate to places where they can do meaningful work and help shape the destiny of their organizations. 5
• Some experts go so far as to say that 90% of training doesn’t’ cause a sustained improvement in performance or change in behavior because it’s neither well designed nor well delivered.  59

Hiring:

• We front-load our people investment.  This means that much of our time and money spent on people is invested in attracting, assessing, and cultivating new hires. 61
• Our greater single constraint on growth has always, always, been our ability to find great people. 61
• The good news is that it doesn’t have to cost more money, but you do have to make two big changes to how you think about hiring. The first change is to hire more slowly. 62 ..and the second big change to make in how you hire – is: “Only hire people who are better than you.”65
• You also need managers to give up control when it comes to hiring.65
• The (recruiting) firms were mystified that we’ll prefer hiring someone who was clever and curious over someone who actually knew what they were doing. 72
• Tied with tests of general cognitive ability are structured interviews where candidates are asked a consistent set of questions with clear criteria to assess the quality of responses… two kinds of structured interviews: behavioral and situational. 93
• Google looks for a particular type of leadership, called “emergent leadership.”…..We have a strong bias against leaders who champion themselves: people who use “I” far more than “we” and focus exclusively on what they accompled rather than how.100
• Constantly check that your hiring process actually works.  102
• We found that four interviews were enough to predict whether or not we should hire someone with 86 percent confidence. Every additional interviewer after the fourth added only 1% more predictive power.103
• Until we hit about twenty thousand employees, most people in the company spent four to ten hours per week on hiring, and our top executives would easily spend a full day each week on it.

Management

• At Google, we have always had a deep skepticism about management.  118
• Managers aren’t bad people. But each of us is susceptible to the conveniences and small thrills of power.  120
• Managers have a tendency to amass and exert power. Employees have a tendency to follow orders.  123
• This is why we take as much power away from managers as we can.  The less formal authority they have, the fewer carrots and sticks they have to lord over their teams,  the more latitude the teams have to innovate.  124
• At Google,  leadership didn’t equate to title. I’d often give my top performers leadership opportunities and help them learn the art of leading without the titled authority…. If you want a nonhierarchical environment, you need visible reminders of your values.  126
• Make decisions based on facts, not managers’ opinions…”If you have facts, present them and we’ll use them. But if you have opinions, we’re gonna use mine.”127-8
• Relying on data.. upends the traditional role of managers. It transforms them from being providers of intuition to facilitators in a search for truth. 128
• Sample bias, where someone is drawing conclusions based on the small flawed sample that they happen to see…or Survivorship bias, where you skew your analysis by considering only the the survivors rather than the entire population. 130
• Every office, every team, every project is an opportunity to run an experiment and learn from it.  This is one of the biggest missed opportunities that large organizations have.   134
• Find ways for people to shape their work and the company  135
• In some ways, the idea of 20 percent time is more important than the reality of it….
• The most talented and creative people can’t be forced to work.136
• “Googegeist” is distinctieve because it is written not by consultants but by Googlers with Ph.D level expertise in everything from survey design to organizational psycyhology, all results both good and bad) are shared with the entire company within one month…it is the basis for the next year of employee-led work on improving the culture and effectiveness of Google.139
• Most employee surveys focus on engagement…a nebulous concept that HR people like…141
• Googlegist instead focusses on the most important outcomes variables we have:  innovation (maintaining an environment that values and encourages both relentlessly improving existing products, and taking enormous visionary bets), execution (launching high-quality products quickly), and retention (keeping the people we want to keep.)141
• It is robust, data-driven discussion that brings the best ideas to light, so that when a decision is made, it leaves the dissenters with enough context to understand and respect the rationale of the decision, even if they disagree with the outcome.  146
• Giving up status symbols is the most powerful message you can send that you care about what your teams have to say. 147
• Managers find many reasons not to trust their people.  .. You just need to find the petty seduction of management and the command and control impulses that accompany seniority.  148
• What managers miss is that evert time they give up a little control, it creates a wonderful opportunity for their team to step up, while giving the manager herself more time for new challenges.  149
• The major problem with performance management systems today is that they have become a substitute for the vital act of actually managing people…Performance management as practiced by most organizations has become a rule-based, bureaucratic process, existing as an end in itself rather than actually shaping performance.  Employees and managers hate it.  Even HR departments hate it.  The focus on process rather than purpose creates an insidious opportunity for sly employees to manipulate the system. 152
• If you’re achieving all your goals, you’re not setting them aggressively enough.  155
• It is critical to ensure fairness.  A managers’s assessments are compared to those of managers leading similar teams..to remove the pressure managers may feel from employees to inflate ratings. 164
• Traditional performance management systems make a big mistake. They combine two things that should be completely separate: performance evaluation and people development. 170
• And it wouldn’t be Google if we didn’t also rely on the wisdom of crowds. Peer feedback is an essential part of the technical promotion pack that committees review. 174
• We do our best to hire people who have a proven aptitude for learning. 176
•  A “Gaussian distribution” will have an average and a standared deviation – it is the standard bell curve. The “two Tails” – the rear and front ends of the bell curve are your best and worst performers.  That is where your biggest opportunities lie.
• Rather than following the traditional path of making “poor performance” the kiss of death, we decided to take a different approach:  Our goal is to tell every person in the bottom 5 percent that they are in that group…and to tell them that we want to help them grow and improve. We called that “Compassionate Pragmatism.”     184
• This cycle of investing in the bottom tail of the distribution means your teams improve…a lot.  People either improve dramatically or they leave and succeed elsewhere. 185
• If you believe people are fundamentally good and worthy of trust, you must be honest and transparent with them. 187
• Because top performers live in a virtuous cycle of great output, great feedback, more great output, and more great feedback, they find it easier to get things done.  It is important that we learn from our best performers. 187
• Project Oxygen initially set out to prove that managers don’t matter and ended up demonstrating that good managers were crucial. 188
• Engineers hate management (based on) traditional environments where managers were largely unhelpful, if not downright destructive. 190
• Project Oxygen sought to really understand the best of the best and the worst of the worst.  What were those managers doing to get such different results? 192
• Manager quality was the single best predictor of whether employees would stay or leave, supporting the adage that people don’t quit companies, they quit bad managers. 193
• The best way to improve is by talking to those providing feedback and asking them exactly what they hope you would do differently.  199
• Nudges aren’t shoves.  The goal is not to supplant decisions-making, but to replace thoughtlessly or poorly designed environments with structures that improve health and wealth without limiting freedom.  292
• We decided to test three types of interventions: providing information so that people could make better food choices, limiting options to healthy choices and nudging.  Of the three, nudges were the most effective. 310
• Simply providing information wasn’t enough to change behavior…people don’t like having choices made for them.  312
• Any idea carried to an extreme becomes foolishness.  318
• We talk a lot about values. And we’re daily confronted with new situations that test those values. 320
• We’d discovered a principle we knew to be true in our earliest days: Innovation thrives on creativity and experimentation, but if also requires thoughtful pruning. 330
• People need to understand the rationales behind each action that might otherwise be viewed as a step down 330
• I realized that these kinds of enormous, brawling, wildly inconclusive debates are part of a culture of transparency and voice.  333
• The debate was important. And sparking a debate should never be a crime. 334
• At a minimum, there’s a chasm between the ideal we aspire to and the grungy day-to-day reality in which we all live…. our aspirations will always exceed our grasp.  334
• Any team or organization trying to implement the ideas advanced in this book will stumble along the way, just as Google does.   A few baby steps in, you will have your own “goji berry juice moment,” where people get upset, or generate awful ideas, or take advantage of the organization’s largesse.  Not one of us is perfect, and a few of us are bad actors.  334-35
• You either believe people are fundamentally good or you don’t.. If you do believe they’re good, then as an entrepreneur, team member, team leader, manager, or CEO, you should act in a way that’s consistent with your beliefs. 337
• Work is far less meaningful and pleasant than it needs to e because well-intentioned leaders don’t believe, on a primal level, that people are good.  Organizations build immense bureaucracies to control their people.  337
• The question is not what management system is required to change the nature of man, but rather what is required to change the nature of work. 339
• What’s beautiful here is that treating your people well is both a means to an end and an end in itself.  340
• To have the privilege working on the cool, futuristic stuff, you had to earn the confidence of the organization. 351
• we stay ahead of management’s expectations (by asking) What ghouls we do differently? What did we learn? What were we told to do that we will choose to ignore and not do?”  (Note every idea from management isa good one) 352
• People are happy when you give them what they ask for. People are delighted when you anticipate what they didn’t think task for …Anticipation is about delivering what people need before they know to ask for it.  355
• You rarely get praised for avoiding a problem. 356
• Be open to crazy ideas. Find some way to say yes. The ultimate source of innovation for us is Googlers across the company.  360
• My diagnosis, in part, is that the (HR) profession doesn’t have the right mix of talent in it, which creates a vicious cycle where the most talented people, who want to work with other talented people, shy away from the field. 361
• In addition, they (People Operations) excel at recognizing patterns (such as sensing the difference between a team that is unhappy because  a new manager is appropriately turning around a group of underperforms and a team that is unhappy because a new manager isa jerk)361