Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

In your company, there is certainly a best salesperson in terms of total sales. By turning to that person to teach others rather than bringing in someone from the outside, you not only have a teacher who is better than your other salespeople, but also someone who understands the specific context of your company and customers. Remember that Groysberg found that exceptional success rarely follows an individual from company to company. Sending your salespeople to the most expensive sales seminars, led by someone who sold products for someone else, is unlikely to revolutionize your sales performance, because the specifics of what your company does matter.

People can exist, indeed did exist for thousands of years, without companies. But companies can’t exist without people.

it’s not about how much time you spend learning, but rather how you spend that time.

My personal and professional experience is that if you give people freedom, they will surprise, delight, and amaze you. They will also sometimes disappoint you, but if we were perfect we wouldn’t be human. This isn’t an indictment of freedom.

The goal of our interview process is to predict how candidates will perform once they join the team.

If you’re committed to transforming your team or your organization, hiring better is the single best way to do it. It takes will and patience, but it works. Be willing to concentrate your people investment on hiring. And never settle.

In Larry’s words: “I think about how far we’ve come as companies from those days, where workers had to protect themselves from the company. My job as a leader is to make sure everybody in the company has great opportunities, and that they feel they’re having a meaningful impact and are contributing to the good of society. As a world, we’re doing a better job of that. My goal is for Google to lead, not follow.”36

Jack explained that Wegmans adheres to virtually the same principles as Google: “Our CEO, Danny Wegman, says that ‘leading with your heart can make a successful business.’ Our employees are empowered around this vision to give their best and let no customer leave unhappy. And we use it to always make our decisions to do the right thing with our people, regardless of cost.”

Wegmans gives employees full discretion to take care of customers, awarded $5.1 million in scholarships to employees in 2013,12and even encouraged an employee to start her own in-store bakery simply because her homemade cookies were so good.

Over time I learned that Wegmans and Google weren’t alone in their approach. The Brandix Group is a Sri Lankan clothing manufacturer, with more than forty plants in Sri Lanka and substantial operations in India and Bangladesh. Ishan Dantanarayana, their chief people officer, told me that their goal is “inspiring a large female workforce” by telling employees to “come as you are and harness your full potential.” In addition to making their CEO and board accessible to all employees, they provide pregnant women with supplemental food and medicine; offer a diploma program that allows employees to learn as they work and even trains them to be entrepreneurs and start their own businesses; appoint worker councils in all plants to help every employee influence the business; offer scholarships for children of employees; and more. They also give back to the community, for example through their Water & Women program, which builds wells in employees’ villages. “This elevates the stature of our employees in the community, and they are then privy to clean water, which is scarce.”

The first time Google was named the Best Company to Work For in the United States was a year after I joined (not thanks to me—but my timing was good). The sponsors of the award, Fortune magazine and the Great Place to Work Institute, invited me to sit on a panel with Jack DePeters, SVP of store operations at Wegmans, an eighty-four-store grocery chain in the northeastern United States that has earned a seventeen-year run on Fortune’s list of best companies to work for, taking the top spot in 2005 and showing up in the top five almost every year since.11

The point of having us both on stage was to showcase our distinctive management philosophies, to show that there was more than one path to becoming a superb employer. Wegmans is a privately held regional retailer that operates in an industry with an average 1 percent profit margin, and its largely local workforce has for the most part a high school education. They’ve been around since 1916 and have been family-run the whole time. Google at the time was a nine-year-old publicly held global technology company with a roughly 30 percent profit margin; its recruits, drawn from all over the world, collected PhDs like trading cards. The two companies could not have been more different.

I was stunned to learn that our companies had far more in common than not.

Each year, tens of thousands of visitors come to our campuses around the world. They include social and business entrepreneurs, high school and college students, CEOs and celebrities, heads of state and kings and queens. And of course, our friends and families, who are always happy to stop by for a free lunch. They all ask about how we run this place, about how Google works. What is the culture all about? How do you actually get any work done with all the distractions? Where does the innovation come from? Do people really get 20 percent of their time to do whatever they want?

Even our employees, “Googlers” as they call themselves, sometimes wonder why we do things a certain way. Why do we spend so much time on recruiting? Why do we offer some perks and not others?

Work Rules! is my attempt to answer those questions.

Inside Google we don’t have a lot of rule books and policy manuals, so this isn’t the official corporate line. Instead, it’s my interpretation of why and how Google works, viewed through the lens of what I believe to be true—and what the latest research in behavioral economics and psychology has revealed—about human nature. As the SVP of People Operations, it continues to be a privilege and delight to play a role, along with a cast of literally thousands of Googlers, in shaping how Googlers live and lead.