Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building

Then-CEO Eric Schmidt shared a simple but extremely effective framework to resolve these tensions: 70-20-10. Google would devote 70 percent of its resources to the core business, 20 percent to emerging products, and 10 percent to research and development for future products.

At every level, a good operating system makes clear the desired results, how and when to communicate progress, and how to measure achievement.

“The biggest mistake I made [early on] is we did not focus on writing [down] the company’s business principles. To delegate to other leaders, we need to write down our principles on hiring, on firing, on performance, on security, on many things.”

First, I got the job because I had built a reputation as a great manager, and being a great manager can be a significant career differentiator. Second, no matter how brilliant a company is, it will not get far, let alone have an impact at scale, without strong management and sound operating systems—what you might call core processes. Over time, my

Managers who under-delegate may model good-quality work, but they don’t necessarily help teams do good-quality work.

“I’ve heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do, and thus we focus on nothing in particular.”

The hardest parts of company building and management are done in private: designing your planning process, deciding who gets promoted, planning a reorganization, reducing the scope of a person’s role.

First, writing is an equalizer.

The goal of a team is to produce the best results, and your job is ultimately to organize the team (or teams) to do so. First, let’s define what we mean by a team.