How Google Works
Insider account by the former CEO and product chief.
Summary
Schmidt and Rosenberg describe the management principles they applied at Google, organised around what they call smart creatives, meaning people who combine technical depth, business understanding and creative capability, and who cannot be managed through traditional process because they have alternatives.
The organising claim is that the cost of experimentation and distribution has collapsed, which means the constraint on a company is the quality of its product rather than its marketing or its distribution, and that this changes what management is for. Their prescriptions follow: organise around the people with the most impact rather than around the org chart, keep teams small, let people choose their projects, and remove managers whose value comes from controlling information.
The specific practices include hiring as the most important activity with hiring committees rather than manager decisions; the seventy twenty ten allocation of engineering effort to core business, adjacent projects and speculative ones; making decisions with data while recognising that data cannot settle questions about what to build; running meetings with a single decision-maker and a documented outcome; and the argument that a company should ship products and iterate rather than plan comprehensively.
Their treatment of strategy argues for betting on technical insights rather than on market research, and for solutions that scale rather than for maximising near-term revenue. The book generalises from a company with extraordinary margins that allowed most of these practices to be affordable. The failures are treated lightly, particularly the repeated social product failures. The authors were senior executives writing about their own tenure, and the hiring and meeting mechanics are the parts that transfer.
Key takeaways 8
- The constraint on a company has shifted to product quality, because the cost of experimentation and distribution has collapsed.
- Smart creatives combine technical depth with business and creative capability, and they cannot be managed through process because they have alternatives.
- Hiring is the most important management activity, and the decision should sit with a committee rather than with the hiring manager.
- Organisations should be built around the people with the most impact rather than around a reporting structure.
- A product should be based on a technical insight that makes it substantially better rather than on market research about what customers say they want.
- Managers whose value comes from controlling the flow of information should be removed, since the information should be available to everyone.
- Every meeting needs a single decision-maker who owns the outcome, and meetings without one produce discussion rather than decisions.
- Data informs decisions and cannot settle questions about what to build, which requires judgment that the data does not contain.
Who should read it
Executives managing technical organisations who want Google's hiring, meeting and allocation mechanics, with the margin conditions understood.
About Eric Schmidt
Former chief executive and executive chairman of Google and Alphabet; earlier chief executive of Novell and CTO of Sun Microsystems.
How Google Works describes the management model Google ran at scale - hiring for learning rate, small engineering teams holding decision rights, and strategy derived from a technical insight rather than from market research. Trillion Dollar Coach records the specific coaching method Bill Campbell used with executives at Google, Apple and Intuit, including how he ran meetings and handled founder-CEO conflict.
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