Google has done a lot of things right, both in their products and also in how they run their company and build their culture, and this is a fairly detailed account of how they've built an impressive culture, and is written by someone who knows - their head of HR. Work Rules!shows how to strike a balance between creativity and structure, leading to success you can measure, in quality of life as well as market share.

The heart of WORK RULES!, a compelling and surprisingly playful manifesto, are lessons that include: - Take away managers' power over employees - Learn from your best employees - and your worst - Only hire people who are smarter than you, no matter how long it takes to find them - Pay unfairly (it's more fair!) - Don't trust your gut: Use data to predict and shape the future - Default to open - be transparent and welcome feedback - If you're comfortable with the amount of freedom you've given your employees, you haven't gone far enough.

Silicon Valley engineers are notoriously difficult to manage. Google even went so far as to get rid of all management positions at one point, but soon realised the ensuing chaos was worse than having management. Still not happy with the old system, they embarked on numerous experiments to determine what makes a good manager. They tracked managers’ performance across projects, and found that the best had the following 8 characteristics: 1.Is a good coach 2.Empowers the team and does not micromanage 3.Expresses interest in, and concern for, team members’ success and personal well-being 4.Is productive and results - oriented 5.Is a good communicator - listens and shares information 6.Helps with career development 7.Has a clear vision and strategy for the team. 8.Has key technical skills that help him or her advise the team Note that the least important is technical skills. Laszlo Bock, the head of people operations at Google, discusses this and a lot more in his book, "Work Rules! Insights From Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead". His more general work rules are: 1.Give your work meaning 2.Trust your people 3.Hire only people better than you 4.Don't confuse development with managing performance 5.Focus on the two tails (best and worst performers) 6.Be frugal and generous 7.Pay unfairly (i.e. pay up for stars) 8.Nudge (small changes make big differences) 9.Manage rising expectations 10.Enjoy! And then go back to No. 1 and start again.

Mr. Bock joined Google in 2006, when there were 6,000 employees. Today there are more than 50,000. His title is head of “People Operations,” rather than the typical “Human Resources,” and by taking readers through the different recruiting and talent-management practices Google has tried during his tenure, Mr. Bock explains how the company got to where it is today.

Google has ditched many of the traditional avenues to reach candidates, since Mr. Bock joined the company. Job boards like Monster.com, he says, “generate many, many applicants and surprisingly few actual hires.” Recruiting firms are also unpopular in Mountain View: They tend to provide companies with specialists, and Google wants generalists. The company prefers “clever and curious over someone who actually knew what he was doing.” In other words, they want people who will try something new.

Mr. Bock notes more than once that it’s harder to get a job at Google than it is to get accepted at Harvard. Yet despite receiving around two million applicants every year for a few thousand positions, Google spends twice as much, as a percentage of its budget on recruiting, than the average company.

It may seem counterintuitive to invest so heavily in recruiting, when the best and brightest are beating down your company door. But this is one of Mr. Bock’s greatest lessons: Outside of college campuses, the best and brightest are usually not looking for a job. Top performers are doing well where they are; odds are they are enjoying what they are doing and being suitably rewarded. Google, therefore, strives to identify those top people—those passive job seekers who aren’t thinking about applying to work at Google (or often anywhere else)—and cultivating them, sometimes over years. They do this through an in-house recruiting team and a candidate database (gHire), which scours the Internet and tracks potential top candidates. Then Google recruiters start networking with them through phone calls and emails, doing whatever it takes to get them hired, including agreeing to hire away entire teams and open new offices, as the company did in Aarhus, Denmark, when they discovered a group of top-tier engineers, based in the city.

Executives should note, that while Google spends more than most on recruiting, it spends far less on training. Top people need less training. And the lesson for talent is, watch how you’re recruited: It’s an indication of the company’s mind-set, and the talent you’ll be working with.

Recruiters at top companies, who are usually inundated with résumés, often limit where they recruit from and the avenues from which to apply. Mr. Bock says that’s a mistake: The right policy is to increase access; just have smarter filters. In Google’s case, this involves using an internal tool called qDroid that provides interviewers with pre-formulated questions. Alongside administering the all-important sample work test, Google strongly recommends that its interviewers assess for cognitive ability, conscientiousness (will an applicant see a job through to completion?) and leadership. Notably, Mr. Bock writes that the company today prefers “to take a bright, hardworking student who graduated from the top of her class at a state school, over an average or even above-average Ivy League grad” because Google prioritizes resilience and overcoming hardship.

In his book, Bock also gives the analysis of "two tails", the best and the worst performers. In traditional management, with narrow remuneration bands, the best-performers should always quit after a great delivery, to seek to maximize their value through competitive market forces. A good observation, is that "the most talented people on the planet are increasingly physically mobile, increasingly connected through technology, and—importantly—increasingly discoverable by employers." At Google, they are rewarded much more inline with their contribution. In traditional management, the worst-performers are fired, and failure is never acceptable. At Google, risk is encouraged and failure from which much is learned, is rewarded.

Bock also points out that we should separate performance reviews, from compensation discussions. “Traditional performance management systems make a big mistake. They combine two things that should be completely separate: performance evaluation and people development. Evaluation is necessary to distribute finite resources, like salary increases or bonus dollars. Development is just as necessary, so that people grow and improve." If you want people to grow, don’t have those two conversations at the same time. Make development a constant back-and-forth between you and your team members, rather than a year-end surprise."

Page after page of Bock's book highlight the unconventional and successful approaches Google has taken to its employees: from the big upfront investment in hiring, to taking authority away from managers, to Googlegeist, to interest clubs. Moreover, Bock and his team make an extraordinary effort to quantify current practices and test new ones. It is HR done the Google/big data way, something that has allowed this team of engineers to expand from two people in Silicon Valley, to fifty thousand across the globe.

“If your goals are ambitious and crazy enough, even failure will be a pretty good achievement.”

“Micromanagement is mismanagement. … People micromanage to assuage their anxieties about organizational performance: they feel better if they are continuously directing and controlling the actions of others—at heart, this reveals emotional insecurity on their part. It gives micromanagers the illusion of control (or usefulness). Another motive is lack of trust in the abilities of staff—micromanagers do not believe that their colleagues will successfully complete a task or discharge a responsibility, even when they say they will.”

“Put simply, because many professionals are almost always successful at what they do, they rarely experience failure. And because they have rarely failed, they have never known how to learn from failure. … They become defensive, screen out criticism, and put the “blame” on anyone and everyone but themselves. In short, their ability to learn shuts down precisely at the moment they need it the most.”

“How many people would you trade for your very best performer? If the number is more than five, you’re probably underpaying your best person. And if it’s more than ten, you’re almost certainly underpaying.”

“Work is far less meaningful and pleasant than it needs to be because well-intentioned leaders don’t believe, on a primal level, that people are good. Organizations build immense bureaucracies to control their people. These control structures are an admission that people can’t be trusted. Or at best, they suggest that one’s base nature can be controlled and channeled, by some enlightened figure with the wisdom to know what is best.”

“Building an exceptional team or institution starts with the founder. But being a founder doesn’t mean starting a new company. It is within anyone’s grasp to be a founder and culture-creator of their own team, whether you are the first employee, or joining a company that has existed for decades.”

“So we ran an experiment. For a period of time, in our control groups of Googlers, people who were nominated for cash awards continued to receive them. In our experimental groups, nominated winners received trips, team parties, and gifts of the same value as the cash awards they would have received. Instead of making public stock awards, we sent teams to Hawaii. Instead of smaller awards, we provided trips to health resorts, blowout team dinners, or Google TVs for the home. The result was astounding. Despite telling us they would prefer cash over experiences, the experimental group was happier. Much happier. They thought their awards were 28 percent more fun, 28 percent more memorable, and 15 percent more thoughtful. This was true whether the experience was a team trip to Disneyland (it turns out most adults are still kids on the inside) or individual vouchers to do something on their own. And they stayed happier for a longer period of time, than Googlers who received money. When resurveyed five months later, the cash recipients’ levels of happiness with their awards had dropped by about 25 percent. The experimental group was even happier about the award, than when they received it. The joy of money is fleeting, but memories last forever.” ― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

Laszlo Bock is the Senior Vice President of People Operations at Google, Inc, where he has worked since 2006. Prior to joining Google, Bock served in executive roles at General Electric, as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company, and in various roles at startups, nonprofits, and in acting. During his time at Google, the company has been named the Best Company to Work for over 30 times around the world and received over 100 awards as a top employer. In 2010, Bock was named "Human Resources Executive of the Year" by HR Resources Magazine.

In 2015, Bock published his first book, The New York Times bestseller and Wall Street Journal bestseller, Work Rules!, a practical guide to help people find meaning in work and improve the way they live and lead.