three defining aspects of our culture: mission, transparency, and voice.

the default leadership style at Google is one where a manager focuses not on punishments or rewards but on clearing roadblocks and inspiring her team.

More typically, a successful project starts with 5 or 10 percent of someone’s time, and as it demonstrates impact it consumes more and more time

First, set goals correctly. Make them public. Make them ambitious.

Leadership.

Senior executives shouldn’t be wasting time debating whether the best background color for an ad is yellow or blue. Just run an experiment. This leaves management free to worry about the stuff that is hard to quantify, which is usually a much better use of their time.”

a more effective and long-lasting approach would be simply to share all the promotion data with Googlers. They crunched the numbers, organized a series of talks, recorded them so people could watch them later, and built a site to share all the data.

Based on our experiments, in early 2013 we stopped doing quarterly ratings, in favor of every six months.

Googlers are also free to solicit feedback on specific topics at any point in the year, rather than waiting for a single day.