Review: Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead by Laszlo Bock
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Work Rules!" was written by a former HR manager of Google. It is an excellent overview of how HR management including recruitment, performance review and learning are organised at Google.

There are many lessons to draw from Google. An engineer-dominated company as it is, Google makes most of the decisions based on data. This is something I could relate to a lot: "Don’t trust your gut. Don’t base your judgement on the first minutes of the interview." Instead, using work samples, tests of general cognitive ability, structured interviews.

I also found insightful examples of how to empower people to shape their work and the company. At Google, they run “quick hit” programmes periodically, focused on more targeted issues. For example:
• “Bureaucracy Busters”: asking people about all the annoying little impediments that make life exasperating.
• “The Waste Fix-It”: asking about practices that waste money.

OKR-s is a well-known practice. The book describes it in a detailed manner - how OKR-s of each individual are interconnected.

One very good lesson - instead of extensive 360 feedback sessions...

.Make the peer feedback templates more specific: instead of asking about several things the person does well / can do better, ask for one single thing the person should do more of, and one thing they could do differently to have more impact. If people had just one thing to focus on, they’d be more likely to achieve genuine change than if they divided their efforts.

"Pay unfairly" is another principle I very much agree with. Individual performance follows a power law distribution - the best people's performance is many times higher than average. Why not pay many times more then?

Glad that we implement many of these practices in our company.

Some of the chapters were not very insightful and did not feel that objective, written by one of the top managers of the company. Overall, however, it was great to learn from the example of the outstanding organisational culture.