you’re selling. If you’re an engineer, we know how much computer code you’re generating. Harder to measure are, what’s the quality of the work you’re doing and how you’re doing it. We don’t want peo- ple who do the job superbly well but are awful people to be around.
So the metrics vary by job, but we do two things to make sure that all this is working and people are successful. One is, when we do performance assessments, we do that by committee as well. A manager will sit down with other managers of Googlers in similar jobs and compare notes about all their people together. So you try to get a good sense of who’s really performing well, who’s not performing, and who are the stars we should learn from, in these big calibration meetings. Te second thing we have is, we survey Googlers to find out how things are going and what the out- comes are. We do an annual survey called
“Googlegeist.” We once or twice a year do a survey that gets to what the quality of our managers is, and a lot of other things like this to just make sure that everything we’re doing is working.
Q. Te expression “If you give people freedom, they will amaze you” could be very useful for the military environment. How do you think that vision might translate to the highly regulated environ- ment of the U.S. military?
A. With the caveat that I’ve never served and I have no idea what I’m talking about, I once gave a talk to a bunch of heads of HR; I talked about what Google does and our culture. And one of them, a guy from an insurance company, raised his hand and said, “What are you talking about? We can’t do this. We’re structured; we’ve got these formulas; we’ve got actuaries, we’ve got accountants. First of all, we can’t do anything you’re doing, and second, we can’t afford to do anything
IT’S THE PASSION, NOT THE PERKS The perks of working at Google, as fun as they are, don’t make the company what it is today. Three components of Google’s culture—mission, transparency and voice—create an environment that en- courages Googlers to come up with interesting and different ideas.
that you’re doing.” And before I could answer, another guy stood up, a head of HR for a consumer product company, and he said, “What are you talking about? Freedom is free. It doesn’t cost anything to give people freedom and let them express themselves.”
And so, if I think about those kinds of environments, which I’m more familiar with, starting from a place where it’s very structured and very regulated, you only need to do very small things for people to experience it as tremendous freedom. So I told the insurance guy, “Look: You have a suggestion box,” and he said, “No, nobody does that anymore. We just run our company, and we have metrics.”
How about a suggestion box? Ask people what they want to do, or set up an email list and have people send you ideas. And once you do that, tell people, “We’re going to set aside $1,000 every quarter, and whatever the best idea is, we’re going to fund it with $1,000. By the way, we’re going to let employees choose what the best idea is. And then they’re going to go
ahead and do it.” And it kind of blew his mind. But something that, in the Google context, we take for granted, in a more structured context … [is] pretty powerful and transformative.
Te myth about Google is that it’s this managed chaos, with bean bags and lava lamps and that kind of stuff going on. Te reality is, we run an incredibly tight operation. If you think about our data centers, basically the way Google search works [is] when you type something into Google, it doesn’t go out and look in real time across the whole Internet; we’ve backed up the Internet. We make a copy, multiple copies all over the world, of the Internet and index it, and that’s the result you’re getting. And the operational dis- cipline—the rigor and the control to be able to do that, and deliver it in the way we do—is tremendous. So in many ways, it’s incredibly structured and regimented. We still find ways to give people a chance to express themselves and have some voice in how things happen.
ASC.ARMY.MIL
71
CRITICAL THINKING
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148 |
Page 149 |
Page 150 |
Page 151 |
Page 152 |
Page 153 |
Page 154 |
Page 155 |
Page 156 |
Page 157 |
Page 158 |
Page 159 |
Page 160 |
Page 161 |
Page 162 |
Page 163 |
Page 164 |
Page 165 |
Page 166 |
Page 167 |
Page 168 |
Page 169 |
Page 170 |
Page 171 |
Page 172 |
Page 173 |
Page 174 |
Page 175 |
Page 176 |
Page 177 |
Page 178 |
Page 179 |
Page 180 |
Page 181 |
Page 182 |
Page 183 |
Page 184 |
Page 185 |
Page 186 |
Page 187 |
Page 188 |
Page 189 |
Page 190 |
Page 191 |
Page 192 |
Page 193 |
Page 194 |
Page 195 |
Page 196
