Book of the Week: How Google Works

19 Oct 2014

How Google Works is part business book, part storybook on Google. The problem is that there are better business books and better storybooks on Google. If you’re a Google fan, then it is worthwhile read. Slides If you don’t want to read the book, you can just flip through these slides. [slideshare id=40175706?rel=0&w;=427&h;=356&style;=border: 1px solid #CCC; border-width: 1px; margin-bottom: 5px; max-width: 100%;≻=no]

How Google Works ** from **Eric Schmidt

Hiring

A workforce of great people not only does great work, it attracts more great people. The best workers are like a herd: they tend to follow each other. Get a few of them, and you’re guaranteed that a bunch more will follow.

Google likes to hire sheep, so they should start hiring VCs. Hiring is the most important thing a CEO needs to do. It is the only way Google can get their hands on the “smart creatives”.

Smart Creative

The talk about the smart creatives reminds me of A Whole New Mind and how we need more than then knowledge working to build innovative companies. To do great things, you need more than just technical skills. You need to be able to apply those skills on business problems. When the vision is clearly laid out by the founders, they should be able to sit back and watch the smart creatives do their magic. One thing that caught my attention was that both The Pursuit of Perfect and How Google Works opted to use female pronouns instead of the standard male pronoun when referring to an imaginary engineer. I wonder if this is part of some secret plot to get more women in engineering. Instagram I really like the footnotes, because they contain interesting tidbits. Apparently Kevin Systrom wanted to get into Google’s Associate Product Manager (APM) program, but he didn’t have the required CS degree, so he left and started Instagram.