Griddle reviewed How Google Works by Jonathan Rosenberg
Review of 'How Google Works' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
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.