Review: How Google works by Jonathan Rosenberg and Eric Schmidt

This book gave me a lot of insight on how people should approach management and why the “old ways” of management are no longer relevant in this “Internet Century”, as the writers call it. A point I really liked was having true meritocracy in the company. A company is meritocratic if any person’s idea can be assessed on its own, not based on who said it. A traditional way of management was to listen to the “Highest Paid Person’s Opinion” (HiPPO for short). The traditional way stifles creativity and the employees have no ownership over the work they do.

How Google has claimed to achieve a meritocratic culture is a theme in the book. Some of the tips that I really agreed with are as follows:

-       Believing in your own slogans. All too often company culture is all talk, no one takes it seriously. Google created and believed in a system that empowers its employees (Googlers) to take on projects not within their day job scope. More importantly the culture does not stigmatise failure, which encourages them to take on these projects. The opportunity for Googlers to take on these extra projects and really make a radical change to the world is what attracts and retains talent.

-       Don’t follow competition. Striving to only be better than your competitors focuses your attention on what is already in the market and only take careful risks. This then leads the company on the road to mediocrity

-       Use some of the accessible technology and data and apply them in an industry to solve an existing problem in a new way

-       Hire only if you genuinely want to hire the person, not to fill up a certain role. Only hire the best for the company.

An issue that I wish were covered is cultural differences. Sure, it is easy to manage a company’s culture when it is a small start-up with a few employees, but what happens when you have a different office in an entirely different country? For instance, in my country (Singapore, but this can apply to many Asian countries) people tend to have a higher respect for authority. How does Google manage to set up this type of culture in a different country?

One thing that I did not like about this book is that it is written in third person, which makes the overall tone feel weird and unnatural considering that the writers are writing from their own experiences.

Overall, I think it is a great book in getting to know how Google is what it is today, but I’m going to take everything with a pinch of salt since what worked for Google may not necessarily work for every other company out there.