Fantastic talk by Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice President, Product Management at Google on Rules to Success. The talk was so heavy with aphorisms that I ended up watching it twice and noted down his various points. They may be slightly off missing a couple of points here and there, but still pretty educational (for me at least 🙂 )
Starting note: I loved this statement at the beginning of the talk:
If you want to build a ship don't herd people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
Antoine-Marie-Roger de Saint-Exupery
Rules on Communication
- Overcommunicate always all the time. You cant communcate enough.
- Openly share everything with your collegues. Trust your people and give them this info. Trust breeds loyalty.
- Repetition does not spoil the prayer.
- Each word matters. Be crisp and direct and choose each word wisely. Its is not rambling: Leave out the parts that people skip. “I would have written a shorter letter if I had the time” : Mark Twain
- Great leaders are great teachers and great teachers are great storytellers. Narrative is what that matters.
- On Talking:
- As leaders you learn more by listening than talking. Listening makes you humble and smart. When you listen you learn how things work, when you talk, you echo how you think things work.
- If you must talk, ask questions. People learn more about you from your questions
- If you actually know the answer in a business situation, talk, but back up with data.
- Try to respond instantly. If you dont respond instantly, everything stalls.
Rules on Culture:
- Avoid Hippos: (Highest paid person’s opinion)
- You should not be able to read an org chart by looking at the product (for example, you cant look at the apple org chart when you look at the ipod).
- Healthy orgs crush bureaucracy in all forms.
- Ask for winning strategy and look for good tactics.
- People are more productive when they are crowded. Social groups moderate bad behavior.
- Empower the smallest of teams. Small teams accomplish more. Read the mythical man month. Create teams about the size of a family.
- Working from home is cancer. Ban it.
- Engineers and product managers add complexity, marketing adds management layers, sales adds coordinators.
- Knights are knights and knaves are knaves. Tom Peters: There is no momentary lapse of integrety.
- Focus on value rather than costs.
- Never suggest copying a competitor. You can do better.
- Hope is not a plan.
- Success breeds the green eyed monster. Take away with surprise and humility.
- Do all re-orgs in a day
Rules on Hiring:
- Know how to interview well.
- Gimmicks like free food, games, etc aren’t that important. People come to google to work with great people.
- Managers don’t hire people. Committees hire people.
- Promotions should be a peer review process.
- Instead of laying off the bottom 10% dont hire anymore.
- Dont hire specialists, esp in high tech. Change is the only thing permanent. “I have no special talent just passionate curiosity.” : Einstein.
- You cannot teach passion. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. If the enthusiasm isn’t palpable in a room, its not there.
- Urgency of a role isnt important enough for a quick hire.
- Identify and purge bad eggs.
- Diversity is your best defense against myopia.
- You cannot punt the management training program.
- Life is not fair. Disproportionately reward risk takers and performers. Don’t tell people they did a good job if they didn’t. Real life is a meritocracy. Celebrate and reward what you want to see more of.
- Build around the people who have the most impact.
Rules on Decision Making:
- Decision making is about concesus and not unanimity. Dont spend hours towards unanimity. Good enough is better. Voltaire: “Perfect is enemy of the good”.
- There is no consensus w/o dissent. Patton: If everyone is thinking alike then someone isnt thinking.
- If there is doubt about what to do think abt customers perspective.
- Choose your goals wisely. If the goals create conflict change the goals.
- No-one of us is smarter than all of us.
- Where there is harmony there is no innovation. Discuss and arguement leads new ideas and new meaning. Innovation comes from disagreement.
Rules on Fostering Innovation:
- You cannot manage creativity to manage risks. Innovation comes from creativity.
- Create a culture of yes based on optimism and big thinking.
- Never stop someone from a good idea for a better one. Darwinian rule works. Best ideas win and others fail.
- A leaders job is not to prevent risk but to recover from failures fast. Good failure happens quickly.
- A good crisis is a terrible thing to waste. Nothing teaches like a crisis.
Rules on Humility
- Learn something new to remember how hard its to learn. Teach something so you can learn.
- Never stop learning. School is never out.
- Humility is correlated with age. Arrogance is inversely correlated with age.
- You get personal leverage from delegation and inspection. Smart people suorround themselves with smart people.
- Judgement comes from experience and experience comes from errors. You learn more from your msitakes. At google screwups are written and archived to learn from for the future.
- Smart ppl can smell hypocracy. Make sure you spend ur time on things you say is important. Culture is set from the top.
- Don’t burn bridges.
- Would you work for yourself?
- Write a self review and be critical about yourself.
- Communicate and confess when you make a mistake.
Final note:
Develop your own style.Styles that worked for others may not work for you (ends with the story of Cortez’s burning the boats, which may have worked for him, but Johnathan prefers the way of the Isreli tank commanders who lead by shouting “Follow me”)
Code Zen 
A great presentation – invaluable – thanks for sharing this.
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Thanks Andrea. It was a very inspirational talk.
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A great presentation and very good rules.
Thanks for the notes.
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Reblogged this on A value equation.
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