How Google Works

How Google Works shines a light on the hiring and operating processes of Google, which have enabled it to come up with great products continuously and stay visionary over the past 17 years.

Here’s the story: Larry Page saw a Google page with really badly designed ads on it. He printed it out and pinned it on a board in the kitchen and wrote “THESE ADS SUCK” next to it on a Friday evening.

A team of engineers saw the note and decided to tackle the problem – over the weekend. They used their free time to work together and solve this problem, and by Monday, the issue was resolved.

What’s the lesson here?

Inspired employees are more important than inspiring leaders.

Page didn’t give them a great motivational talk about why Google needs these ads to be perfect. He just pointed out a problem and because the engineers were already inspired people, they decided to give it a go.

How do you get inspired employees? By creating the right company culture.

This comes back to your core ideology: What are your values? What’s your purpose? Why do you do things?

Make sure your values are inspiring, and your leaders won’t have to be.

If you have a great set of values, the right kind of people will be attracted to your company. The kind that’s ambitious, not driven by money, and smart.

Google calls them smart creatives.

The only way to keep those smart, creative and inspired employees, is to treat them as equals when making decisions.

That means sometimes decisions will take a lot of time, but that’s okay, because in the end, employees will always support the final decision.

Smart creatives want to be 100% convinced that the decision is the right choice, so they won’t follow suit if they’re not. For example when Sergey Brin disagreed with an engineer, he suggested half the team should follow him, and half the engineer. Eventually, the entire team followed the engineer, because he had the more convincing solution.

This is actually highly efficient, since everyone will be dedicated to building the solution as best as they can, just because they believe it’s the right way to go.

However, sometimes you do need a decision fast, which is why Google had daily meetings about a deal with AOL in 2002 for six weeks straight. Since it was a pressing issue, they committed to give the decision some time each day, to make sure a consensus was achieved before the deadline.