How Google Works

As Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian note in Information Rules, information is costly to produce but cheap to reproduce.

She also understands its fallacies and is wary of endless analysis. Let data decide, she believes, but don’t let it take over.

One of the best, easiest ways to get ahead in a field is to know more about it. The best way to do that is to read. People always say they don’t have the time to read, but what they are really saying is that they aren’t making it a priority to learn as much as they can about their business.

Good news will be just as good tomorrow, but bad news will be worse. That’s why you must make it safe to ask the tough questions and to tell the truth at all times, even when the truth hurts.

one of Google’s smart creatives, Luiz Barroso, talked about it in a smartly worded internal Google+ posting in late 2014 that was forwarded to us. He called it his Roofshot Manifesto (“We choose to go to the roof not because it is glamorous, but because it is right there!”), and it quickly spread among Googlers. In his manifesto, Luiz correctly cal

although your plan might change, it needs to be based on a foundational set of principles that are grounded in how things work today and that guide your plan as it shape-shifts its way to success. The plan is fluid, the foundation stable.

The basis for success then, and for continual product excellence, is speed.

Over time I’ve learned, surprisingly, that it’s tremendously hard to get teams to be super ambitious. It turns out most people haven’t been educated in this kind of moonshot thinking. They tend to assume that things are impossible, rather than starting from real-world physics and figuring out what’s actually possible.

As Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, says: “In the old world, you devoted 30 percent of your time to building a great service and 70 percent of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.”19

The primary objective of any business today must be to increase the speed of the product development process and the quality of its output.