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Aims:
- Go for really big targets: mapping all the streets, scanning all the books, etc.
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Values:
- Focus on the user
- Constantly communicate and reinforce with rewards the key values.
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Innovation Strategy:
- 70/20/10 rule: 70% core, 20% emerging, 10% new
- Focus on big challenges, stuff that will affect hundreds of millions of people.
- Focus on users
- Don't look for empty spaces and be lonely
- Innovation = production and implementation of novel and useful ideas
- novel in that it is surprising
- Market research can't get you to your next product:
- Henry Ford: If I had listened to customers, I would have gone out looking for faster horses
- Can't follow competition --- incremental, low impact changes
- Talk to technical people
- Focus on what people need
- What will be true in five years
- Pasteur's Quadrant:
- basic science + real world problems
- Look at criticism. Find what doesn't work, etc. Larry: 'these ads suck'
- Learn to fail well:
- Learn technical, user, market insights
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Investment Strategy:
- Bet on technical insights
- What could be true in 5 years?
- Companies devote care and feed business that got them big. Not wise always. Internally GOOG allocated resources not just based on how big the prod. was, but how big it could be:
- Bill Gates' Maxim: Spend 80% of the time on 80% of the revenue
- Organize around people who can create and lead entire new ventures
- Buffett: Looks for leaders who don't need him
- From corp. perspective --- all innovative things look like small opportunities compared to large company.
- At indiv. level: people penalized for failure.
- Job of CEO --- think of core business + about future
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Keys to a company:
- Products based on technical insights
- Product people on leadership team
- Reward and promote people with biggest impact
- Hiring a top priority for C-suite level with execs spending time on it
- Employees are free
- Good decision making processes
- Information routers doing better at company
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Organization
- Staying functionally organized but not by product. So engineering, products, finance ....
- If re-org., do reorg. quickly
- Organize around people having highest impact
- Each team = Bezos 2 pizza rule
- Accountability
- Keep them crowded
- Encourage conversations
- Keep them crowded but have spaces to go to
- Product Managers work, eat, live with engineers
- If we have data, let's look at the data. Jim Barksdale. CEO, Netscape
- Old school
- HiPPos: Highest paid person opinion
- Rule of 7:
- Each manager should have at least 7 people directly reporting
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Communication/Info. sharing
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Default to open
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Board letter posted internally
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OKR --- transparency tool --- Individual's objectives, key results. Each person posts to public site.
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Top leaders candidly discuss where they failed and why
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Know the details: what issues, what deliverables
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snippets --- important activities for a week. Shared with everyone.
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Open Q/A session at TGIF
- Climb (get out of danger), Confess (confess), and comply
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Communication
- Enforce core themes in communication
- Make it effective, fun, interesting, inspirational
- Authentic
- Right people
- Right medium
- Tell the truth, be humble
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Email
- Respond quickly, crisply, clean out your inbox constantly
- handle email in LIFO
- remember you are a router
- bcc only to get people out of an email loop
- If you need to yell, yell in person
- When you send a note to someone with action item you want to track, copy yourself then label follow-up
- just resend w/ new intro: is this done
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Management
- Make sure you would work for yourself
- Write your own performance review once a year
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Process
- Spend 80% of time on 80% of revenue (Bill Gates)
- Bias for action (Tom Peters)
- hands on, trial-and-error
- Promote transparency:
- open up everyone's calendars
- hold more company wide meetings + q/a w/o reprisal
- Roofshots + Moonshots
- Moonshots:
- Make things 10x better not just 10%
- Roofshots
- Luiz Barroso --- methodical, relentless pursuit of 1.3--2X opportunities.
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Meetings:
- CEO Staff meeting: 50% of people should be experts in company's products and services and responsible for prod. dev.
- Beware of bobblehead yes (Novell nod)
- Agree in meeting, criticize later
- Get quiet people to talk
- Eric Schmidt method:
- Identify the issue, have the argument, set a deadline
- For important issues, meet everyday
- Throw out stupid softballs
- Right decision = best decision
- Coach Wooden: be interested in finding the best way, not your way
- Strategy Meeting:
- Slides kill innovation. Get input from everyone
- Articulate a rough time frame and end point you want to achieve
- End meetings with 'you are both right,...'
- Good meeting features
- Meetings should have a single decision-maker/owner
- Include senior as decision-maker
- Decision maker should be hands on
- Even brain storming sessions should have a clear owner
- Meetings should be easy to kill
- Manageable size: no more than 8 people. 10 max.
- Attendance not important: if you are not needed, leave early.
- Timekeeping matters: begin on time, end on time. Leave enough time for summarizing and action items
- If you attend the meeting, attend the meeting
- Meetings should have a single decision-maker/owner
- 1 on 1s:
- Manager write down list of top 5 things, Employee does the same. And hopefully there is a lot of overlap
- Performance
- Sales Figs
- Prod. delivery/milestones
- Prod. and Eng.
- Marketing and Product
- Management
- Innovation
- Performance
- Manager write down list of top 5 things, Employee does the same. And hopefully there is a lot of overlap
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Partnerships
- Be aggressively generous with partners in revenue sharing as it will eventually benefit the company.
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Most important job --- same answer as what a sports coach would give: Draft, recruit, and trade for best players you can. No amount of strategy can substitute for talent.
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Who to hire:
- People smarter, more knowledgeable than you
- Hire people who will get things done
- Self-motivated, passionate, well rounded, communicate openly
- Can't hire Bs and Cs. Only As.
- Hire people with high IQ
- Lorne Michaels rule: "Don't hire anyone that you wouldn't want to run into by the bathrooms at 3 in the morning."
- LAX test: people you would like to spend time with
- Hire as many talented software engineers as possible. Dawned on Jonathan: brilliant coders and system designers. but also biz savvy and creative.
- Smart creative
- Analytically smart
- Business smart
- Competitive smart
- user smart
- curious
- risky
- self-directed
- open
- communicative
- Rule of thumb: at least 50% of GOOG employees should be engineers
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How to hire?:
- Hire by committee, peer-based, not hiring manager
- Trusted interviewer program:
- people good at interviewing, and enjoy interviewing
- score interviewers on:
- reliability
- how many interviews conducted (not cancel last minute)
- quality and promptness of feedback
- Interviewer mandate
- form strong opinion
- rate people on 1 to 4
- average score = 3, but ask people to take a stand so each score like 0 or 4.
- Calibrate interviewer scores
- 30m interview
- 4 interviews per person (85%)
- Qs:
- Ask broad qs. to provoke a discussion
- Sergey: can you teach me something complicated that I don't know
- What big trend did you miss about the Internet in 1996? What did you get right? And what did you get wrong? Makes candidates define what they expected etc.
- What books are you reading right now? How did you pay for college?
- If I were to look at the web history of your browser, what would I learn about you that isn't on your resume
- Packet should be evaluated in 120 seconds
- Highly qualified people are also interviewing you
- Hiring packet for CEO
- Comprehensive, standardized
- One page summary
- Highlight best and worst answers
- Compensation history, reference info.
- includes resume for typos
- what is not in the packet, doesn't get considered
- Bodsworth rule: asshole to secretary don't hire
- Everyone knows someone great
- Four sections:
- General cognitive ability
- Role Related knowledge
- Leadership experience
- Googleyness:
- Ambition and Drive
- Team orientation
- Service orientation
- Listening and Communication skills
- Bias to action
- Effectiveness
- Interpersonal skills
- Creativity
- Integrity
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Who to fire:
- Nip crazy in the bud
- Have at max 1 diva, and that person better be worth it
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Retaining/Talk if people leaving:
- Get young bright people on the APM program right out of school
- Pay really good people really well
- Encourage job movement. Who on the team is a good cand. for rotation. Get the best people not the worst.
- Talk about:
- Young people can overreact after hitting a bump in the road
- Plan to develop their career
- Congratulate and welcome them to their company alumni network
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How to manage:
- Give them freedom
- Continue to give opportunities to people to learn new things, even skills not beneficial directly to company
- Coach people. Everyone needs a coach. Best athletes need a coach etc.
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Insights/Baloney/Quotes:
- Voltaire: perfect is the enemy of the good
- Steve Jobs: real artists ship
- Total books = 130M
- Ellen West: "To be a thought leader, you have to have a thought."
- Writer Elmore Leonard: "I leave out the parts that people skip"
- "Repetition doesn't spoil the prayer" --- Eric
- Ray Kurzweil: "Information technology is growing exponentially...and our institution about future isn't exponential, it's linear."
- Google Porn analysis:
- content of an image, context (stay on the image for a long time than if they click on image of a medical textbook)
- Google search aims to improve on 3 things:
- comprehensiveness, accuracy, freshness
- Entering era of 'combinatorial innovation' (Hal Varian)
- If you want something done, give it to a busy person
- So many software prod. in reaction to Microsoft. So Google's suit of office products etc. in response to MSFT browser/search ambitions
- Used to be the case that best electronics were at work. You left office, and you didn't have them at home
- Economy:
- Three production factors cheaper = information, connectivity, computing power
- Better products because:
- Information about products + more choices:
- Bezos: "Old world you devoted 30% of time to building a great service, 70% shouting about it. New world inverts it."
- Cost of experimentation and failure is lower.
- Information about products + more choices:
- Adwords --- Ad Relevance score for each query
- Humor:
- Lehman Brothers Motto: Our mission is to build unrivaled partnerships with and value for our clients through the knowledge, creativity and dedication of our people, leading to superior results for our shareholders.
- Enron: respect, integrity, communication, and excellence
- Plan your career:
- What is your ideal job 5 years from now?
- Where do you want to be? What do you want to do? How much $ you want to make? Write down the job description for your ideal job
- Know your elevator pitch