Take the $500 we give each Googler after childbirth to spend on home delivery of meals.

The mythologist Joseph Campbell argued that there are just a few archetypal stories that underpin most myths around the world. We are called to an adventure, face a series of trials, become wiser, and then find some manner of mastery or peace.

On the topic of goals, the academic research agrees with your intuition: Having goals improves performance.113 Spending hours cascading goals up and down the company, however, does not.114 It takes way too much time and it’s too hard to make sure all the goals line up.

I had the pleasure of working with Frank Wagner, who is now one of our key People Operations leaders at Google, in 1994, when we were consultants. In the minutes before every client meeting, he would take me aside and ask me questions: “What are your goals for this meeting?” “How do you think each client will respond?” “How do you plan to introduce

Making the templates more specific reduced the time spent writing reviews by 27 percent, and for the first time, 75 percent of peers felt that writing the reviews was helpful, up 26 points (on a scale of 100) from the prior year. Those using the discussion guide with their managers rated their performance conversations 14 points more favorably than

Ed Schein, now retired from the MIT School of Management, taught that a group’s culture can be studied in three ways: by looking at its “artifacts,” such as physical space and behaviors; by surveying the beliefs and values espoused by group members; or by digging deeper into the underlying assumptions behind those values.

allow outcomes to be calibrated across groups.

Yet everyone in People Operations has a few traits in common. Each one is a gifted problem solver. Each has a dose of intellectual humility, which makes them open to the possibilities that they could be wrong and always have more to learn. And each is tremendously conscientious, caring deeply about Googlers and the company.

Group A was the control group, and just did their jobs. Group B read stories from other employees about the personal benefits of the job: learning and money. Group C read stories from scholarship recipients about how the scholarships had changed their lives. Groups A and B saw no difference in performance. Group C, in contrast, grew their weekly