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How Google Works
Eric Schmidt
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What is How Google Works about?
Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, both experienced Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, arrived at Google, but over the course of a decade, they realized that it was wise to heed coach John Wooden’s observation that "what matters is what you learn after you know it all." While helping Google evolve from a young start-up to a global icon, they relearned everything they knew about management. How Google Works is a summary of these experiences, presented as an entertaining, easy-to-read guide on corporate culture, strategy, talent, decision-making, communication, innovation, and handling disruptions.
Key ideas of How Google Works
Hiring Smart Creatives
The companies that win in the internet age are those that recruit technically expert, creatively driven people and then build an environment where those people can do their best work.
Culture Over Strategy
Real company culture is not a mission statement but what employees actually do when no one is watching, as shown by Google engineers who fixed broken ads on a Sunday without being asked.
Default to Openness
Sharing information broadly, with employees and sometimes the public, accelerates innovation and scale far more reliably than controlling and hoarding it does.
Read an excerpt from the summary
The Finland Email
July 2003. Eric Schmidt opens an email from Mike Moritz, the Sequoia Capital partner who sits on Google's board, and reads a polite request that lands like a summons. Moritz wants three hours in mid-August to walk through a comprehensive Google business plan. Specifically, he wants to know what the company intends to do about Finland.
Finland was the internal code name for Microsoft.
At the time Google was a five-year-old startup with a few hundred employees, an advertising product called AdWords that had begun printing money, and an IPO already in the pipeline. It also had no business plan worth showing to a man like Moritz. There were no market projections, no channel strategy, no five-year forecast, no org chart, no product roadmap, no milestones. The company had a list — the Top 100 Projects spreadsheet, publicly visible, debated in semi-quarterly meetings, reshuffled whenever an engineer noticed something more interesting. That was the plan.
Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, the head of products, faced a problem older than venture capital. The board wanted a real document. Google's culture would gag on a real document. Whatever they produced had to satisfy a famously demanding investor without insulting the founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who had built the company on the suspicion that conventional management was, in Larry's word for Jonathan's first product plan, "stupid."
So they wrote something else. The Finland presentation, delivered that summer, said Google would win by focusing on users, building excellent platforms, shipping higher-quality services than anyone else, and trusting that the user base would pull the advertiser base along behind it. There were no spreadsheets. Microsoft would eventually spend an estimated eleven billion dollars trying to dislodge Google — through MSN Search, Windows Live, Bing, and the aQuantive acquisition — and none of it worked. Google grew into a fifty-billion-dollar company in forty countries, employing more than forty-five thousand people, and got itself added to the Oxford English Dictionary as a verb.
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Continue in the appWho is it for?
- Anyone who leads or manages a team and wants to attract and retain exceptional technical talent.
- Anyone who is building or scaling a technology company and wrestling with how to preserve a strong culture.
- Anyone who wants to understand how Google's product and business decisions were made during its formative years.
- Anyone who is frustrated by slow, hierarchical decision-making and is looking for practical alternatives.
About the author: Eric Schmidt
Eric Schmidt served as Google's CEO from 2001 to 2011, overseeing the company's growth from a few hundred employees to a global organization of more than forty-five thousand people. He later became executive chairman of Alphabet. Before Google, he was CEO of Novell and held senior roles at Sun Microsystems.
Jonathan Rosenberg joined Google in 2002 as Senior Vice President of Products, shaping the company's product strategy through some of its most consequential years. He later served as an advisor to Alphabet's CEO.
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