Brie Wolfson

We first wrote these “10 things” when Google was just a few years old. From time to time we revisit this list to see if it still holds true. We hope it does—and you can hold us to that.

Even if you want to be big someday, remember that you never need to act like a big boring company.

Stripes that move on from the company and find themselves at companies that don’t embrace the written word to the same extent. I count myself among them. We all report feeling a bit lost and disconnected from their colleagues without it.

At critical moments in time, you can raise the aspirations of other people significantly, especially when they are relatively young, simply by suggesting they do something better or more ambitious than what they might have in mind. 

Instead of protecting your teams from failure, prepare them for it.

Which way you run is often the key differentiator between effective and ineffective CEOs. Almost all CEOs know where the problems are, but only the truly elite ones run towards the fear.