How Google Works

Google started as the project of graduate students at Stanford, but as it became successful and grew they realized they needed some managerial assistance, and this book comes from two of the people they brought in: Eric Schmidt (Executive Chairman) and Jonathan Rosenberg (SVP of Products). As one of the most successful companies in the world (perennially in the top three for market capitalization) knowing how they did that is worth some consideration. And this is an interesting book for that. Their story is that they were brought in to apply management skills but quickly learned that Google could not be managed the way they were used to doing it. They focus on empowering creative people to do awesome things, and there is certainly evidence that Google does that, but it is also true that this is an insider's book that is not going to air any dirty laundry. So take it with a grain of salt.

To my knowledge it is the latest review of the Google phenomenon written by the former CEO Eric Schmidt and former Senior Vice President of Products Jonathan Rosenberg . The book starts with the introduction of a typical employee the smart creative. Not an average guy/girl who do just want a job at some IT firm, but who is superintelligent and the best of the graduates and have enough crazy ideas of startup-worthy quality. „Don’t settle for anything less“ These are high requirements considering that probably all of Google‘s competitors have a similar target group. And it is also somewhat believable, since Google has achieved the transition from a startup to a tech giant. However, all this talk about disrupting markets and creating the industry of the future should be taken as PR. There is also the viewpoint that such success stories are based on singular events - in this case the advent of the internet technology - that cannot repeated and generalized. As for the rest of the book: it is more a manual of personal management for software engineer as well as a manual for business leaders and managers of creative groups. It gives insight into how Google manages product development and how they do business and employee reviews (e.g. OKR‘s). There is some generic knowledge, but there are also specific measures given on how Google wants to push innovation and reach their goals, which may worthwhile for startups to adopt.