Google's golden rules of management

In a recent Newsweek article, Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, writes about the guidelines the company uses to manage itself. Strongly inspired by the ideas of Peter Drucker, Google’s main concern is its knowledge workers.

At Google, we think business guru Peter Drucker understood well how to manage the new generation of “knowledge workers”. After all, Drucker invented the term in 1959. He said that knowledge workers believe they are paid to be effective, not to work 9 to 5, and that the smartest businesses will have to clear away everything that gets in their workers’ way. Those that succeed in attracting the best will secure “the single biggest factor for competitive advantage in the next 25 years.”

This is the 10-point recipe Google’s executives offer for managing companies:

1. Hire by committee. Candidates are interviewed by at least half a dozen people, from both management and their possible future colleagues.

2. Cater to the workers’ needs. According to Drucker, the goal is to “clear away anything that gets in the way” of knowledge workers, so Google provides a standard package of benefits, with the aim of avoiding distractions. At the end of the day, programmers want to program. Even laundry is taken care of (no, they don’t find anyone a girlfriend or boyfriend).

3. Teamwork. The programmers who make up the team for a project share the same physical space, which improves communication.

4. Make coordination easy. Programmers at Google frequently send periodic notes to the whole team with the status of their work.

5. Use your own tools. Everything built and every tool developed in the company is used by, and available to, everyone.

6. Encourage creativity. Engineers can devote 20% of their working hours (with prior authorization and proper follow-up) to creating and developing any project of their choosing.

7. Try to reach consensus. At Google the manager’s role is to moderate and bring together different points of view.

8. Don’t be evil. Google’s famous motto; the point is to put it into practice.

9. Decisions are made based on quantitative data.

10. Effective communication. It’s customary to hold a management meeting every Friday with news, presentations, and questions and answers. That way, management stays connected with the employees, and vice versa.