As someone who will soon start working at Google, I had big expectations for this book. I thought this book would enlist the inner workings of Google and its parent company alphabet. I expected this book to be the single greatest management book ever.

Sadly though, my expectations were not met. The author spent 300 pages telling us how cool Google is, and how easy it is to replicate its success. But that's far from true. I think Google is one in a million company, that had many different things that made it successful, so it is hard to attribute its success to only the few things mentioned in this book.

I'm also not really sure who this book is for. I think it was meant to be read by startup founders, but I think employees at bigger and smaller companies would also find value in some of the content. Some chapters deal with issues that only late stage companies deal with so I'm really confused.

Overall, I think you'd be fine if you skip the book.

Good advice on running a business and good insight into what Google is like. Obviously not everything in the book will be able to be applied in all situations, but it's interesting nonetheless.

Lots of great lessons, very interesting and open. Very business-y too — not perfect for bathtub reading.

Won't finish. Mostly hype.

Hyped drivel. If the ideas in this book are new to anyone, then it will take more than this book likely to help. I got to chapter 6 before deciding that I am going to find a better use for my time. It is mostly an Eric Schmidt Google circle jerk.

Tenía curiosidad sobre cómo hacen las cosas en Google, y el libro te lo da. En ocasiones divertido con las notas al pie y unas cuantas referencias frikis.
No he aprendido mucho, pero está bien conocer cómo lo hace un gran referente de la industria.
Lo mejor los ejemplos y anécdotas concretas sobre cómo nacieron productos tan conocidos hoy en día

inspirational and with many great principles

I expected the book to be awesome when I added it to my reading list a few months ago. It was actually so good that I read it in a single sitting today :) Pretty much every idea in this book resonated very strongly with me. Focus on the user, the money will follow. Optimise for growth, not for revenue. Work is an important part of life, not something to be separated. Default to open processes. Fail well. Don't be evil. I also really liked the use of the expression 'smart creatives' to describe the learning animals who thrive in today's rapidly changing world.

The only thing that put me off was the focus on creating crowded offices and the stance against working from home. Whilst I agree that collaboration and cross-pollination of ideas are important, this felt a bit alienating to me as an introvert. Providing a bit of quiet space for those who need it occasionally to recharge increases overall productivity. Seriously, it's about time we stopped designing the world for extroverts only and tried to be a bit more inclusive.

Culture is one of the key ingredients to the success of a company. I highly recommend this book to everyone who cares about innovation in workplace culture.

There is no one across the globe who does not use this site…Wait ! Strike that out ! Let me rephrase this as : The search engine of Google and its associated products and services are used by a wide variety of people across the globe barring mainland China. The topic of Google in China is now a major case study and not one which this review can hope encompass. The focus is here is on this small yet extremely impressive book about some of the inner workings of Google as viewed by Jonathan Rosenberg and Eric Schmidt. Both of them have been long term Google employees yet still maintained their outsider POV’s. I should tell you upfront that my perspectives on this book are almost solely motivated by what I have seen, heard and experienced around me in the professional environ.

The book is an overview of the business, people management and innovation practices that Google preaches and practices. While we might not really understand how Google 'works’from these pages, we do get to understand how Googlers work and what keeps them ticking in a generic way. Eric and Jonathan touch some of the basic management aspects with reference to running any large corporation in a seamless way which include the company’s way of handling recruitment, performance management, rewards and recognitions and building a vibrant work culture. The key differentiator between Google and any other company in the technology space is the nature of its workforce. In Eric and Jonathan’s lingo, these are called the ‘Smart Creatives’- highly adaptable, intelligent and a dynamic set of people who form the core of the company. Being on a totally different plane of performance, it also tends to be equally important to manage these star performers in the right fashion. Any manager you know will tell you that managing a star performer is a very dicey affair and one you have to put a lot of planning into. So you can imagine what it would be to have a company full of such performers. In the process of hiring and working with such a creative set of people, Google has also given the World a fair share of technology leaders the likes of Kevin Systrom, Marissa Meyer, Sheryl Sandberg , Andy Rubin and Nikesh Arora to name a few. When you have such visionary individuals working for you, them wanting to move on to try something different is exceptionally high.

My personal favorites from this book are two aspects of running operations in a a technology company : recruitment and communication. Most organizations do not have a huge chunk of problems, most problems that they have are the ones they hire. A wrong person in the wrong role will be the death of business as we know it and there are examples galore for this. The companies who have a successful track record put in a lot of focus on the hiring process and this is where Google marks a different path too. They are known for the curveballs thrown at candidates during interviews which check the adaptability factor more than anything else. The checkpoints that the company has established in terms of the interview process and the review mechanisms ensure that the weeding out of the wrong person happens at the fastest possible time. This does not mean that they do not hire the wrong people but that the quantum of such wrong hires is not substantial enough to disrupt the company.

The second aspect of communication is even more important. I am a firm believer of the concept that there is no such thing as over communicating in a corporate environment. The practices that Google employs with regards to getting the leadership team in front of the people and answering questions for them is a practice that can be emulated (it does get emulated in a lot of firms) across a variety of corporate environments. There is no replacement to such dialog when it comes to boosting morale of the employees. Eric and Jonathan highlight the case of Google shutting down operations in China as an example of how a high-impact decision can be communicated well and to high acceptance to the workforce of the company. There are countless other anecdotes and case studies on innovation, rewards and general management scattered through this book.

This said, all the content of this book will need to be taken with a proverbial pinch of salt. Why ? Because it is Google telling us. Not that I hide any negative connotations behind that statement. It is just that a company who is a world leader can afford to do a lot of things that most others cannot afford. Let’s look at an example : If you have a firm that is struggling to meet its financial and revenue targets and is pretty much hobbling along, the first thing that gets flung out of the window is work culture. In a scenario where everyone rolls up their sleeves and enters the trenches for a bloody battle is no place for a highly work culture oriented place. While the example is slightly exaggerated, some of the aspects that the authors talk about here cannot be applied per se to other firms. What is needed is a careful introspection of the points they raise and how they can be tuned to best use in your corporate scenario. If you apply this as is, it will stick out like a sore thumb !

A fantastic book ! Thoroughly loved it !