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WORK RULES!

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ADDITIONAL PRAISE FOR

WORK RULES!

“Clearly written, evidence-based, with practical guidance and a cogent underlying philosophy, WORK RULES! needs to rule the world of work.” —Jeffrey Pfeffer, author of Leadership B.S

“WORK RULES! is a surprising, unconventional book that is required reading for anyone looking for a job in the tech sector, and for every entrepreneur seeking new modes of innovative thinking.” —Peter H. Diamandis, chairman, XPRIZE; exec. chairman, Singularity

“A riveting ringside view of people operations at Google. A deft marriage of research and practice that is full of practical tips. It is an indispensable book for all people managers.”

—Robert I. Sutton and Hayagreeva Rao, coauthors of Scaling up Excellence

“As a company renowned for questioning our assumptions, it should be no surprise that Google has developed unique and profoundly effective approaches to culture, talent, and leadership. By debunking many accepted HR practices WORK RULES! establishes itself as a new testament for managing talent in modern times.”

—Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO and author of Change By Design

“Laszlo Bock has done far more than codify Google’s recipe for its high-freedom, high-performance workplace – he has created the essential guide for unleashing talent in the digital age. Intelligent, playful, and practical, Work Rules! is for all leaders who want to inspire brilliance and bring out the best of humanity in their workforce.”

—Liz Wiseman, author of Multipliers and Rookie Smarts

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WORK RULES!Insights from Inside Google That Will

Transform How You Live and Lead

LASZLO BOCK

NEW YORK BOSTON

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JOHN MURRAY


First published in Great Britain in 2015 by John Murray (Publishers)An Hachette UK Company

1

© Laszlo Bock 2015

The right of Laszlo Bock to be identified as theAuthor of the Work has been asserted by him in

accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. Apart from any use permitted under UKcopyright law no part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by anymeans without the prior written permission of the publisher,

nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover otherthan that in which it is published and without a similar condition

being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

Hardback ISBN 978-1-444-79235-5Trade paperback ISBN 978-1-444-79236-2

Ebook ISBN 978-1-444-79237-9

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

John Murray policy is to use papers that are natural,renewable and recyclable products and made from wood

grown in sustainable forests. The logging and manufacturingprocesses are expected to conform to the environmental

regulations of the country of origin.

John Murray (Publishers)338 Euston Road

London NW1 3BH

www.johnmurray.co.uk


For Annabelle, Emily, and Lila

may you always love what you do

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Where’s the work that’ll set my hands, my soul free—“We take care of our own,”

bruce springsteen

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Contents

Preface: A Guidance Counselor’s Nightmare 1Building the perfect Google resume, in retrospect

Why Google’s Rules Will Work for You 7The surprising (and surprisingly successful) places that work just as we do

1. Becoming a Founder 17Just as Larry and Sergey laid the foundation for how Google treats its people, you can lay the foundation for how your team works and lives

2. “Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast” 29If you give people freedom, they will amaze you

3. Lake Wobegon, Where All the New Hires Are Above Average 54Why hiring is the single most important people activity in any organization

4. Searching for the Best 69The evolution of Google’s “ self- replicating talent machine”

5. Don’t Trust Your Gut 87Why our instincts keep us from being good interviewers, and what you can do to hire better

6. Let the Inmates Run the Asylum 118Take power from your managers and trust your people to run things

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viii | Contents

7. Why Everyone Hates Performance Management, and What We Decided to Do About It 150Improve performance by focusing on personal growth instead of ratings and rewards

8. The Two Tails 178The biggest opportunities lie in your absolute worst and best employees

9. Building a Learning Institution 204Your best teachers already work for you. . . . Let them teach!

10. Pay Unfairly 225Why it’s okay to pay two people in the same job completely different amounts

11. The Best Things in Life Are Free (or Almost Free) 260Most of Google’s people programs can be duplicated by anyone

12. Nudge . . . a Lot 283Small signals can cause large changes in behavior. How one email can improve productivity by 25 percent

13. It’s Not All Rainbows and Unicorns 318Google’s biggest people mistakes and what you can do to avoid them

14. What You Can Do Starting Tomorrow 336Ten steps to transform your team and your workplace

Afterword for HR Geeks Only: Building the World’s First People Operations Team 349The blueprint for a new kind of HR

Work Rules 367Acknowledgments 371Photo Credits 375Notes 377Index 397About the Author 405

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WORK RULES!

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Preface: A Guidance Counselor’s Nightmare

Building the perfect Google resume, in retrospect

My first paycheck came in the summer of 1987, when I was fourteen years old. My best friend, Jason Corley, and I had been invited by our high school to enroll in

a summer- school debate class the year before ninth grade. By the next year, we were teaching it. We earned $420 each.

Over the next twenty-eight years, I amassed a random walk resume that could best be described as a guidance counselor’s nightmare: I worked in a deli, a restaurant, and a library. I tutored high school students in California and taught elementary school students English in Japan. I was first a lifeguard in real life at my college pool, and then I played one on TV, appearing on Baywatch as a 1960s lifeguard in a flashback and as that old acting standby, “Man walking across background.” I helped start a nonprofit that sup-ported troubled teens, and worked at a manufacturer that built con-struction products. I stumbled into consulting on executive pay, and with all the wisdom a twenty- four- year- old can muster, observed that human resources was a stagnant field and fled to get an MBA. Two years later I joined McKinsey & Company, the management consulting firm, where I focused as little on people issues as I could. During the dot- com boom years up until early 2000, I advised tech-nology companies on how to grow sales, users, and organizations. And when the bubble popped, I advised technology companies on how to slash costs, run efficiently, and pivot into new businesses.

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But by 2003 I was frustrated.Frustrated because even the best- designed business plans fell

apart when people didn’t believe in them. Frustrated because lead-ers always spoke of putting people first, and then treated them like replaceable gears. (Low point on my first project: I asked my man-ager for career advice and he told me, “You guys are all like arrows in a quiver. Every one of you is the same.”)

I’d held blue- collar jobs and white- collar jobs, been paid mini-mum wage and a six- figure salary, toiled alongside— and been man-aged by— people who didn’t finish high school and people with PhDs from the poshest universities in the world. I had worked in an envi-ronment where our sole purpose was to change the world, and another where it was all about profits for the owner. It just didn’t make sense to me that no matter where I turned, people weren’t treated better in their jobs. You spend more time working than doing anything else in life.1 It’s not right that the experience of work, even at some of the best employers, should be so demotivating and dehumanizing.

I determined that I had two paths to choose from. The first was to treat my teams better, improve their output, and hope that over time others would follow my example. The second was to find a way to influence how entire companies treat people. I chose the latter path because I believed it would give me the greatest chance of affecting the most people, and decided to find a job in human resources (HR). My colleagues in consulting thought I was commit-ting professional suicide, but I’d done my homework. At the time, there were more than five thousand people in McKinsey’s database of alumni, but only a hundred of them were in human resources, virtually all working as consultants for other firms or recruiters. I reasoned that my training and background would make me stand out in the HR talent pool and help me come up with novel solutions. And maybe, just maybe, that would help me have a faster career trajectory than waiting twenty or thirty years to creep up the cor-


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Preface: A Guidance Counselor’s Nightmare | 3

porate ladder. I might get to a place where I could impact more peo-ple, faster.

I wanted to work at the places where I could learn as much as possible about HR, and Pepsi and General Electric were the best- regarded HR shops at the time. I cold- called eight HR executives from the two companies, but only one, Anne Abaya at GE, returned my call. Anne, a fluent Japanese speaker from Hawaii who somehow was always able to carve out a few minutes here and there to help people, found my background intriguing and introduced me to oth-ers at GE.

Six weeks later, I was hired. I was now the Vice President of Compensation and Benefits of the Commercial Equipment Financ-ing division of the GE Capital division of the General Electric Company. I was thrilled to be there, though my friends took one look at my business card and thought I was nuts. My first boss, Michael Evans, gave me tremendous latitude to explore the com-pany and helped me understand GE’s approach to talent.

People mattered to Jack Welch, GE’s chairman and CEO from 1981 to 2001. He spent more than 50 percent of his time on people issues,2 and together with Bill Conaty, his chief human resources officer, built an acclaimed people management system by strin-gently ranking employees based on performance, choreographing job changes for top talent every twelve to eighteen months, and building a global training center in Crotonville, New York. Jack had handed over the reins to a new CEO, Jeff Immelt, two years before I joined, which allowed me to see what had been built and how it changed as Immelt’s focus shifted to other areas.

Welch and Conaty had implemented a 20- 70- 10 performance ranking system, where GE employees were sorted into three groups: the top 20 percent, the middle 70 percent, and the bottom 10 percent. The top workers were lionized and rewarded with choice assignments, leadership training programs, and stock options. The


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bottom 10 percent were fired. Under Immelt, the forced distribu-tion was softened and the crisp labels of “top 20 percent,” “middle 70 percent,” and “bottom 10 percent” were replaced with euphemisms: “top talent,” “highly valued,” and “needs improvement.” Colleagues told me that the vaunted Session C process, a yearlong review of tal-ent across the 300, 000- person- strong company, had “lost its teeth” and “just wasn’t the same without Jack’s focus.” 3

I didn’t have the benefit of having worked under both CEOs, but it dawned on me how deeply a CEO’s persona and focus can shape an institution. Most CEOs are very good at many things, but they become CEOs for being superbly distinctive at one or two, which tend to be matched to a company’s needs at that time. Even CEOs need to declare a major. Welch is best known for Six Sigma— a set of tools to improve quality and efficiency— and his focus on people. Immelt instead emphasized sales and marketing, most vis-ibly through GE’s branded “ecomagination” efforts to make and be perceived as a maker of greener products.

In 2006, after three years at GE, I was recruited to join Google as head of People Operations. I remember the recruiter, Martha Josephson, trying to convince me not to wear a suit to the interview. “No one wears suits,” she assured me, “and they’ll think you don’t understand their culture if you show up in one.” I took her advice, but was skeptical enough that I carried a necktie stuffed into my jacket pocket in case I needed it. Years later, I’d interview a candi-date who had clearly purchased a beautiful pinstripe suit just for the interview, but who was still so exceptional that I could tell we’d hire him. I closed the interview with, “Brian, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that, while you still have more interviews to go, I can tell that you’re going to get an offer. The bad news is that you’re never going to get to wear that suit again.”

When I joined, it was two years after Google’s initial public offering: Revenues were growing 73 percent a year; Gmail had just launched with an unheard-of free gigabyte of storage (five hun-


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Preface: A Guidance Counselor’s Nightmare | 5

dred times more than prior webmail services— this was so crazy that people thought Gmail was an April Fool’s joke)4; there were six thousand Google employees and the company wanted to double in size every year; and they had this wildly ambitious mission to organize the world’s information— all of it!— and make it univer-sally accessible and useful.

This mission for me was by far the most exciting part. I was born in 1972 in Communist Romania, a country ruled by the dicta-tor Nicolae Ceausescu and permeated by secrecy, lies, and fear. It’s hard to conceive of today, but Romania at the time was much like North Korea today. Friends and family members would disappear for criticizing the government. Members of the Communist Party had access to fine clothes, consumer goods, and fruit and vegetables from the West, while my parents didn’t taste their first banana until they were in their thirties. Children were encouraged to spy on their parents. And the newspapers and radio disseminated little but lies about how great the government was and how evil and oppres-sive the United States was. My family fled Romania seeking free-dom, the right to go where they wanted, say and think what they wanted, associate with whomever they wanted.

The idea of joining a company founded with a goal of making information available to everyone was thrilling, because the state of freedom is predicated on free expression, which in turn relies on access to information and truth. I’d lived and worked in all kinds of environments and seen lots of examples of what didn’t work. If this place is for real, I thought, this is going to be the best job in the world.

Since I joined, Google has grown from six thousand employees to almost sixty thousand, with seventy- plus offices across more than forty countries. Fortune has named Google the “Best Company to Work For” an unprecedented five times in the United States, as well as numerous times in countries as diverse as Argentina, Aus-tralia, Brazil, Canada, France, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea,


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the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Switzerland, and the UK. Google is the most sought- after place to work on the planet according to LinkedIn,5 and we receive more than two million applications every year, representing individuals from every background and part of the world. Of these, Google hires only several thousand per year,6 making Google twenty- five times more selective than Harvard,7 Yale,8 or Princeton.9

Far from being professional suicide, my time at Google has been a white- water ride of experimentation and creation. Some-times exhausting, sometimes frustrating, but always surging for-ward to create an environment of purpose, freedom, and creativity. This book is the story of how we think about our people, what we’ve learned over the past fifteen years, and what you can do to put peo-ple first and transform how you live and lead.


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1work rules first ch

Documents

swork rules

world of work

unleashing talent

practical guidance

practical tips

author of leadership

author of change

author of multipliers