Work Rules!
Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead
Laszlo Bock
Bock's account of how Google built its people practices is at its best when it is concrete: hiring as a process to be tested rather than intuited, transparency as a default, and the discipline of treating people decisions as questions with evidence attached rather than matters of taste.
The single most practically useful idea in it is also the cheapest: separate the developmental conversation from the pay conversation. Hold them at different times, for different purposes, with different framing. The reasoning is obvious once stated — nobody hears a word about their growth while they are waiting to find out what happens to their salary — and yet almost no organisation does it. If you take one thing from this book into practice next quarter, take that.
The caution is the one that applies to every book written from inside one exceptional company. This is a single organisation, in a single labour market, at a particular moment, with extraordinary selection effects and the budget to match. Practices that work when you can hire the top of the market and pay to keep them do not automatically survive translation to a mid-sized manufacturer in the Midlands.
Read it for the mechanics and, more importantly, for the posture: the insistence that people practices are testable claims rather than received wisdom. That posture transfers anywhere. The specific rules mostly don't.
Our own commentary on Laszlo Bock's book. We don't summarise other people's work — if this is useful, buy the book.
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