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How Google works - Book Review

Google was a start up company. investor asked Eric to rally the  team  and create a plan that would establish clear deliverables across the company: product , sales , marketing , finance and corporate development. Plan needed to establish milestones and a roadmap of which products would ship and when.

To this day the rule of thumb is that late half of Google employees should be engineers.

Jonathan has plenty of experience in the "gate based" approach to building product which in most companies entails a series of well defined phases and milestone, governed by various executive reviews that escalate slowly up the corporate food chain . This approach is designed to conserve resource san funnel information up from far-flung silos to small set of design-makers.

Google engineers are business savvy and possessed a healthy streak of creativity.

Hire the best engineers and get out of their way.

How Google was able to beat Microsoft 11 billion dollar challenge is explained.

Why product excellence is required.

Cost of experimentation and failure has dropped significantly.


http://www.wsj.com/articles/book-review-how-google-works-by-eric-schmidt-and-jonathan-rosenberg-1412371982
"company is a symbol of innovation, success and technology leadership."

Anyone managing technology-focussed team should read this book, though not all the lessons will translate outside of Google's unique culture or the era when many of the decisions were made.

If you believe that Google sees the world as zeros and ones and manages that way, this book should serve to ground you in the potential challenges faced by management trying to see decision-making programmatically. What you will find is a framework held together by talented engineers, supported by an insatiable demand for data, and acted on with a set of principles that aren’t always as binary as “smart creatives” might prefer.


http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21620056-search-giant-shares-some-its-business-methods-dont-be-modest

Though it is not discussed in the book, Google’s management philosophy doubtless springs from the careers of the founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Their youth, vision and technical genius, together with Google’s vast wealth, enabled the company to take risks that others would never contemplate. This is why it vies to photograph every street in the world and scan every book ever published, to say nothing of building self-driving cars and glasses that record almost everything.

In large part Google grew because it threw out the traditional MBA playbook; its success speaks for itself. However, this underscores a shortcoming of “How Google Works”. The experience of Messrs Schmidt and Rosenberg is so coloured by Google’s accomplishments that many of their recommendations best apply to managing teams of aces in lucrative, fast-growing markets, not to overseeing a wide range of talent in low-margin businesses—the life of most managers.