How Google Works by Eric Schmidt & Jonathan Rosenberg
This book is probably one of the most quickest ways of understanding how Google operates. If you want to have a glimpse of why Google is so successful, this book is for you. It also helps you to determine if you would be a good fit for Google as your employers. Are you in now?
There is no qualified people who can write a book about Google, probably just the founders, than Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg. Eric is Executive Chairman of Google from 2001 to 2015 and Alphabet from 2015 to 2017. Jonathan was Senior Vice President of Product from 2002 to 2011. These time periods marks the phase of rapid growth for Google. The company made initial public offering in 2004 and quickly became one of the world's largest media companies.
I was immediately impressed by their first chapter: How Alphabet Works. Alphabet was created in order to solve the problems they observed from being big as a company: Process. Process was killing innovation (such as budget process). The leaders wanted to continue to focus on core while keeping the innovation fresh. So the new structure was introduced - Alphabet as a parent company and Google became a subsidiary of this new holding company. Several other businesses spun out of Google and became independent companies under Alphabet: Waymo, Nest, Verity, X, Calico, Fiber, Google Ventures, Deep Mind, Google Capital, Sidewalk Labs, Freedom. It provides smaller start-up business to function as a start-up. These start-up model, with small, autonomous teams led by founders, was thoughts to be the most effective way to achieve remarkable new things: Think big, Act small. Splitting these two also helped core focus on the core like Google Search.
The new keyword that advanced version of Knowledge work in this book is Smart Creative. They are the people in the center of Google's innovation. They understand technology, analytical, competitive, understands users, curious, risk-taking, self-directive, creative, thorough creative, and communicative. Of course, the author mentions that that is not the right representation of everybody at Google, but Google is aspired to find Smart Creative.
The following six chapters go on more details on Culture, Strategy, Talents, Decisions, Communications, Innovation. To me, the most important chapter was Strategy. It emphasizes having enough product leaders to be on senior leadership. New Products have to be based on new unique technical insights. It really tells me that if you want to be successful in Google, you want to be successful in Product organization. Granted the engineering background of two founders, people who are successful in Google has Product/Engineeing background - Sundar Pichai as a good example.
Although some of my friends at Google may or may not agree with the author's perspective, I thought this book taught me how such a big organization tries to captures, foster, and focus on innovation. It takes the culture, talents, organizational structure, leaders to truly make it work.
Now, do you think you are the right fit to Google? Are you a Smart Creative?
Below two pages are to add to my list of questions I would like to remember to ask in my daily job. Hope it helps for you too.
One note - my earlier blog entry I noted Susan Wojcicki set the OKR. In fact, she drove the org to meet that goal effectively, however the person who came up with the OKR was an engineer named Cristos Goodrow. He convinced Salar Kamangar, ex-CEO of Youtube before Susan, and the rest of the leadership to move OKR from video views to time spent.
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