Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

Why hiring is the single most important people activity in any organization

Some experts go so far as to say that 90 percent of training doesn’t cause a sustained improvement in performance or change in behavior because it’s neither well designed nor well delivered.72

Googlegeist instead focuses on the most important outcome variables we have: innovation (maintaining an environment that values and encourages both relentlessly improving existing products and taking enormous, visionary bets), execution (launching high-quality products quickly), and retention (keeping the people we want to keep).

companies have many employees, but a person has only one job.

list specific projects, their roles, and what they accomplished. We limited Googlers to 512 characters to describe what they did

Performance improved only when companies implemented programs to empower employees (for example, by taking decision-making authority away from managers and giving it to individuals or teams), provided learning opportunities that were outside what people needed to do their jobs, increased their reliance on teamwork (by giving teams more autonomy and

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

Following the interviews, we survey every interviewee with a tool we call VoxPop,xxviii to find out what they thought of the process, and later use their feedback to adjust our process accordingly.

A host of errors in how we make decisions sneak in when we assess others.