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Notes on "How Google Works" by Eric Schmidt and Alan Eagle

Some notes from "How Google Works" by Eric Schmidt and Alan Eagle. Very interesting book, definitely recommended.

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Over time I’ve learned, surprisingly, that it’s tremendously hard to get teams to be super ambitious. It turns out most people haven’t been educated in this kind of moonshot thinking. They tend to assume that things are impossible, rather than starting from real-world physics and figuring out what’s actually possible. It’s why we’ve put so much energy into hiring independent thinkers at Google, and setting big goals. Because if you hire the right people and have big enough dreams, you’ll usually get there. And even if you fail, you’ll probably learn something important.

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It’s also true that many companies get comfortable doing what they have always done, with a few incremental changes. This kind of incrementalism leads to irrelevance over time, especially in technology, because change tends to be revolutionary not evolutionary.

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We both came to Google as seasoned business executives who were pretty confident in our intellects and abilities. But over the humbling course of a decade, we came to see the wisdom in John Wooden’s observation that “it’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.”

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But it wasn’t Google’s culture that turned those five engineers into problem-solving ninjas who changed the course of the company over the weekend. Rather it was the culture that attracted the ninjas to the company in the first place.

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As former General Electric CEO Jack Welch said in Winning: “No vision is worth the paper it’s printed on unless it is communicated constantly and reinforced with rewards.”

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But these, as we shall see, would become integral to creating—and sustaining—a culture where a simple statement like “These ads suck” is all that’s needed to make things happen.

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One last organizational principle: Determine which people are having the biggest impact and organize around them.

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Bill Campbell, the former Intuit CEO and ongoing coach and mentor to us both, often quotes Debbie Biondolillo, Apple’s former head of human resources, who said, “Your title makes you a manager. Your people make you a leader.”

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Once you identify the people who have the biggest impact, give them more to do.

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Life is something like that island, only more complicated. For not only are knaves in real life devoid of integrity, they are also sloppy, selfish, and have a sneaky way of working their way into virtually any company. Arrogance, for example, is a knavish tendency that is a natural by-product of success, since exceptionalism is fundamental to winning. Nice humble engineers have a way of becoming insufferable when they think they are the sole inventors of the world’s next big thing. This is quite dangerous, as ego creates blind spots.

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(Tom Peters: “There is no such thing as a minor lapse of integrity.”) (my note: I there is)

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There are tipping points in knave density. It approaches a critical mass—which is smaller than you think—and people start to believe they need to be knave-like to succeed, which only exacerbates the problem. Smart creatives may have a lot of good traits, but they aren’t saints, so it’s important to watch your knave quotient.

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Knaves need to be dealt with as quickly as possible. But as long as their contributions match their outlandish egos, divas should be tolerated and even protected. Great people are often unusual and difficult, and some of those quirks can be quite off-putting. Since culture is about social norms and divas refuse to be normal, cultural factors can conspire to sweep out the divas along with the knaves.

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Marissa Mayer, who became one of Silicon Valley’s most famous working mothers not long after she took over as Yahoo’s CEO in 2012, says that burnout isn’t caused by working too hard, but by resentment at having to give up what really matters to you.

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If someone is so critical to the company’s success that he believes he can’t unplug for a week or two without things crashing down, then there is a larger problem that must be addressed. No one should or can be indispensable. Occasionally you will encounter employees who create this situation intentionally, perhaps to feed their ego or in the mistaken belief that “indispensability” equals job security. Make such people take a nice vacation and make sure their next-in-line fills in for them while they are gone. They will return refreshed and motivated, and the people who filled their shoes will be more confident. (This is a huge hidden benefit of people taking maternity and paternity leaves too.)

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A great start-up, a great project—a great job, for that matter—should be fun, and if you’re working your butt off without deriving any enjoyment, something’s probably wrong. Part of the fun comes from inhaling the fumes of future success. But a lot of it comes from laughing and joking and enjoying the company of your coworkers.

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There’s a problem with these Fun events: They aren’t fun.

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Everyone’s fun when they’re dancing to Billy Idol and swigging an Anchor Steam. (my note: Agreed)

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Here’s our idea for off-sites: Forget “team building” and have fun. Jonathan’s criteria for his excursions included doing outdoor group activities (weather permitting) in a new place far enough from the office to feel like a real trip, but still doable in a day, and providing an experience that people couldn’t or wouldn’t have on their own.

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Sheryl Sandberg ran a book club for her sales team that was so popular in our India office that every single person participated.

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(Eric doesn’t adhere to Satchel Paige’s advice to “dance like nobody’s watching.” When you’re a leader, everyone is watching, so it doesn’t matter that you dance poorly, it matters that you dance.)

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A defining mark of a fun culture is identical to that of an innovative one: The fun comes from everywhere. The key is to set the boundaries of what is permissible as broadly as possible. Nothing can be sacred. In 2007, a few of our engineers discovered that Eric’s profile photo in our intranet system was in a public folder. They altered the background of the photo to include a portrait of Bill Gates, and, on April Fools’ Day, posted the updated image on Eric’s page.

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It’s fun, and can only occur in a permissive environment that trusts its employees and doesn’t defer to the “what happens if this leaks?” worrywarts. It’s impossible to have too much of that kind of fun. The more you have, the more you get done.

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“When you are in a turnaround,” the man told him, “find the smart people first. And to find the smart people, find one of them.”

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(Eric was once asked at a company meeting what the Google dress code was. “You must wear something” was his answer.)

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To do all this, you have to be crazy enough to think you will succeed, but sane enough to make it happen. This requires commitment, tenacity, and most of all, single-mindedness. When Israeli tank commanders head into combat, they don’t yell “Charge!” Rather, they rally their troops by shouting “Ah’cha’rye,” which translates from Hebrew as “Follow me.”

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We have no idea what your venture is or even your industry, so we won’t presume to tell you how to create a business plan. But we can tell you with 100 percent certainty that if you have one, it is wrong.

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(Henry Ford: “If I had listened to customers, I would have gone out looking for faster horses.”)

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Companies have always built networks, but historically those networks were internal and designed to reduce costs. In this way, they followed the tenets of University of Chicago economist and Nobel laureate Ronald Coase, who argued that it often makes sense for firms to do things internally rather than externally, because the transaction costs of finding vendors, negotiating contracts, and making sure the work gets done right are high.

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Coase was right: The internal management costs were lower than the transaction costs of outsourcing. This led them to do as much as they could within the organization, and, when they did go outside their four walls, they worked with a small group of tightly controlled partners.

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Today, Coase’s framework still holds true—but it leads to radically different outcomes than it did in much of the twentieth century. Rather than growing the biggest possible closed networks, companies are outsourcing more functions and working with a bigger and more diverse network of partners. Why? Don Tapscott put it well in Wikinomics, when he wrote that “the Internet has caused transaction costs to plunge so steeply that it has become much more useful to read Coase’s law, in effect, backward: Nowadays firms should shrink until the cost of performing a transaction internally no longer exceeds the cost of performing it externally.”

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we didn’t choose to specialize in that area because our crystal ball told us it would ultimately be more lucrative and impactful than the alternate, more popular portal business model. Rather, we focused on search because it was something we felt we were better at than anyone else. So in those early days of the Internet, while these leaders of the industry were busy tending to their business of building Internet portals, Google search got better and better at providing great answers for users.

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Open also allows you to harness the talents of thousands of people, because, as Sun cofounder Bill Joy noted, “no matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.”

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For a manager, the right answer to the question “What is the single most important thing you do at work?” is hiring.

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A workforce of great people not only does great work, it attracts more great people. The best workers are like a herd: They tend to follow each other. Get a few of them, and you’re guaranteed that a bunch more will follow. Google is renowned for its fabulous amenities, but most of our smart creatives weren’t drawn to us because of our free lunches, subsidized massages, green pastures, or dog-friendly offices. They came because they wanted to work with the best smart creatives.

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Their deep interest made them more interesting, which is why in an interview context our philosophy is not “Don’t get them started.” When it comes to the things they care most about, we want to get them started.

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our experience raw brainpower is the starting point for any exponential thinker. Intelligence is the best indicator of a person’s ability to handle change.

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Henry Ford said that “anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.” Our ideal candidates are the ones who prefer roller coasters, the ones who keep learning.

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Favoring specialization over intelligence is exactly wrong, especially in high tech. The world is changing so fast across every industry and endeavor that it’s a given the role for which you’re hiring is going to change.

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Once you hire those learning animals, keep learning them! Create opportunities for every employee to be constantly learning new things—even skills and experiences that aren’t directly beneficial to the company—and then expect them to use them. This won’t be challenging for true learning animals, who will gladly avail themselves of training and other opportunities. But keep an eye on the people who don’t; perhaps they aren’t quite the learning animals you thought they were.

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So, passion is crucial in a potential hire, as is intelligence and a learning-animal mindset.

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Another crucial quality is character. We mean not only someone who treats others well and can be trusted, but who is also well-rounded and engaged with the world. Someone who is interesting. Judging character during the interview process used to be fairly easy, since job interviews often included lunch or dinner at a restaurant and perhaps a drink or two, Mad Men style. Such a venue allowed the hiring executive to observe how the candidate comported himself “as a civilian.” What happens when he lets his guard down? How does he treat the waiter and bartender? Great people treat others well, regardless of standing or sobriety.

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We institutionalized the LAX test by making “Googleyness” one of four standard sections—along with general cognitive ability, role-related knowledge, and leadership experience—on our interview feedback form. This includes ambition and drive, team orientation, service orientation, listening & communication skills, bias to action, effectiveness, interpersonal skills, creativity, and integrity. (Larry and Sergey took the LAX test one step further when they were looking for a CEO: They took candidates away for a weekend. Eric played it a bit more conservatively: “Look, guys, I don’t need to go to Burning Man with you. How about dinner?”)

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Supercomputer pioneer Seymour Cray used to deliberately hire for inexperience because it brought him people who “do not usually know what’s supposed to be impossible.”

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John Dewey, an American philosopher and writer, said that “a problem well put is half solved.”

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It should go without saying—but it usually doesn’t, so we’ll say it—that data is best understood by those closest to the issue, which is often not management. As a leader, it is best not to get lost in details you don’t understand, but rather trust the smart people who work for you to understand them.

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As General Patton famously said, “If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.”

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They may be dissenters who are afraid to disagree with you in public (but need to get over that fear), or they may be of the shy but brilliant type. Or perhaps they truly have nothing to say, in which case maybe they shouldn’t be at the meeting in the first place. One technique is to throw out a few “stupid softballs” that let people dip their toe in the water of disagreeing with the boss.

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“Do something,” he told the executive, “even if it’s wrong.” Tom Peters would call Bill’s attitude in this situation a “bias for action,” and his book In Search of Excellence lists it as a top common attribute of the companies he studied.

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there is real signaling value in using your convening power as a leader to hold regular meetings. If the decision is important enough, the meetings should be daily.

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People complain about meetings and how they are a great waste of time, but in fact a well-run meeting is a great thing. It’s the most efficient way to present data and opinions, to debate issues, and yes, to actually make decisions.

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One of the most important decisions any business leader makes is how to spend his or her time. When Eric became CEO of Novell in 1997, he got some great advice from Bill Gates: Spend 80 percent of your time on 80 percent of your revenue.

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That shiny new stuff can be much more interesting than the boring old core business stuff, but it’s the core stuff that pays the bills, and if you make a mistake there, you probably won’t be able to recover.

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If someone is in charge of a business and can’t rattle off the key issues she faces in a matter of ten seconds, then she’s not up to the job. A hands-off approach to leadership doesn’t cut it anymore. You need to know the details.

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This doesn’t just apply to questions. It is one of the most universal of human truths: No one wants to be the bearer of bad news. Yet as a leader it is precisely the bad news that you most need to hear. Good news will be just as good tomorrow, but bad news will be worse.

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of our favorite Urs quotes from the user manual: “I didn’t grow up in the US, and I tend to be more direct than others when I talk about something.… I tend to overstate points for clarity of argument—it’s easier to summarize something in black and white vs in shades of gray.… If you think I am wrong, you need to tell me. I’ll never blame anyone for speaking up.… If you feel I’m beating you up all the time and all you’re getting is negative feedback, then it’s very likely that this wasn’t intentional.”

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many companies (universities too), the incorrect, knee-jerk management reaction is to discourage employees from connecting with company rock stars. After all, they might waste their time with stupid questions, right? Yes, that does happen, but it turns out that most rock stars have very little patience for people wasting their time and they make doing so a very unpleasant experience. The inexperienced smart creative who does it once quickly learns not to do it again.

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One of Eric’s most basic rules is sort of a golden rule for management: Make sure you would work for yourself.

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Think about the late novelist Elmore Leonard’s response to a question about his success as a writer: “I leave out the parts that people skip.”

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This isn’t just handy for emails, but important documents too. Jonathan scans his family’s passports, licenses, and health insurance cards and emails them to himself along with descriptive keywords. Should any of those things go missing during a trip, the copies are easy to retrieve from any browser. (My note: just did it)
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(Champion racecar driver Mario Andretti: “If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.”)

Updating the blog and present/future research

I decided to start providing regular updates on my Marie Curie research on this blog.

These are my plans for the next 6 months, the content is basically coming from email exchanges with my collaborators.

- Pedigree reconstruction in the marble trout population of Lipovesck. We have recently genotyped the individuals that have been sampled in 2013 (June and September) and 2014 (June and September). All samples have been sexed and I am ready to carry out the pedigree reconstruction, with particular focus on the post-2009 generation. In 2009, a huge flood hit Lipovesck and just a handful of marble trout survived. The main goal is to understand the recovery process after the flood, who reproduced and whether certain traits were related with higher chances of post-flood reproduction. Then, I'd like to test whether my predictions on post-flood recovery (younger age at reproduction due to the relaxation of density-dependent processes after an episode of massive mortality) were right. If it is true, we should expect the 2011 cohort to have reproduced (at least some individuals) in 2013, thus anticipating one year reproduction (at age 3 or 4 under normal conditions).

- Phylogeny of marble trout living in Western Slovenia. We are sequencing right now additional fish from the populations of Idirijca, Svenica, and Studenc. For Idirijca, the sequencing of additional individuals was motivated by the lack of a sufficient number of SNPs for pedigree reconstruction (96 SNPs recommended, ~80 should be enough). Fish from Svenica and Studenc have never been sequenced. In order to save some money, we tried to sequence fish from some of the populations part of the cluster identified by Fumagalli et al. 2002 (14 microsatellite loci were used). However, since almost none of the SNPs found in the populations of Trebuscica and Idrijca were found to be variable also in Svenica and Studenc, we now have the suspicion that Svenica and Studenc are not as genetically close to Trebuscica and Idrijca as reported by Fumgalli et al. After this sequencing run, we should have all the elements for studying the phylogeny of marble trout, inbreeding, loci under selection etc.

- Writing a technical paper on SNP discovery for marble trout. While we are still discovering and characterizing SNPs for the populations of Idirjca, Svenica and Studens, I am confident we will discover the population-specific panel of SNPs soon. The only real problem is the population of Huda, for which we found very little to almost non-existent polymorphism. Given money, we might try to sequence some fish from Huda using an Hi-seq machine (we are currently using a Mi-seq with size selection at 500 base pairs).

- Differences in life-histories (growth, survival, morphology) in marble trout, including density-dependent patterns, with the main focus on the relationship between growth and survival as possibly mediated by cannibalism. Most of the analysis have been done.

Paper accepted in Marine Ecology Progress Series

Here below is the abstract.

Vincenzi S, Mangel M (accepted) Food abundance, kittiwake life histories, and colony dynamics in the Northeastern Pacific: implications of climate change and regime shifts. Marine Ecology Progress Series

Abstract

Black-legged kittiwakes Rissa tridactyla in the Northeastern Pacific will increasingly experience climate-induced changes in the variability of forage fish, which will influence both quantity and quality of food and may thus alter the population dynamics of kittiwake colonies. However, the relative roles of individual- and population-level traits in determining colony dynamics and risk of extinction are still unclear.

We combined models of components of the Pacific kittiwake life history with empirical data linking physiological stress and food abundance to provide a unified treatment of kittiwake colony dynamics. We simulated the dynamics of colonies with high, medium and low responsiveness of productivity to variation in nutritional stress in breeding birds, using data from Alaskan colonies. We found that the risk of quasi-extinction strongly decreased with a moderate increase of the potential number of yearly immigrants. Pre-breeding mortality as a function of growth during development had only a marginal role in determining median number of breeding pairs over simulation time. We predict that temporal auto-correlation of colony-wide average productivity and high nutritional stress, particularly if consistent over time, will increase quasi-extinction risk. Our work shows that colonies with low productivity have little chance to persist even when survival of pre-breeding and breeding birds is high, and that the nature of the temporal auto-correlation of food conditions and productivity is crucial to understand the effect of environmental fluctuations, regime shifts, and climate change on population dynamics of kittiwakes. We use the model to highlight the most valuable future empirical studies.

New paper published in PLOS Comp Bio on random-effects models for individual growth

Here below is the abstract and here is the code for all the analysis.

Vincenzi S, Mangel M, Crivelli AJ, Munch S, Skaug HJ (2014) Determining individual variation in growth and its implication for life-history and population processes using the Empirical Bayes method. PLOS Computational Biology 10(9): e1003828. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003828 [pdf]

Abstract

The differences in demographic and life-history processes between organisms living in the same population have important consequences for ecological and evolutionary dynamics. Modern statistical and computational methods allow the investigation of individual and shared (among homogeneous groups) determinants of the observed variation in growth. We use an Empirical Bayes approach to estimate individual and shared variation in somatic growth using a von Bertalanffy growth model with random effects. To illustrate the power and generality of the method, we consider two populations of marble trout Salmo marmoratus living in Slovenian streams, where individually tagged fish have been sampled for more than 15 years. We use year-of-birth cohort, population density during the first year of life, and individual random effects as potential predictors of the von Bertalanffy growth function’s parameters k (rate of growth) and L_inf (asymptotic size). Our results showed that size ranks were largely maintained throughout marble trout lifetime in both populations. According to the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC), the best models showed different growth patterns for year-of-birth cohorts as well as the existence of substantial individual variation in growth trajectories after accounting for the cohort effect. For both populations, models including density during the first year of life showed that growth tended to decrease with increasing population density early in life. Model validation showed that predictions of individual growth trajectories using the random-effects model were more accurate than predictions based on mean size-at-age of fish.

Career of Marie Curie Fellows

The European Commission just published an interesting document on the long-term career development of Marie Curie researchers: Marie Curie researchers and their long-term career
development: A comparative study". You can find it here (executive summary).

in general, it seems that Marie Curie programs have a positive effects on multiple indicators of career quality (although not speed). This part was particularly interesting:

"No particular effects on career ‘speed’ were registered. MC fellows achieve  professorship titles more frequently than other fellows, but this seemingly requires  more time than for researchers with smaller mobility experience, i.e. those that  tend to stay in the same institution throughout their entire career. Here, an ‘affiliation effect’ can be observed which rewards non-mobile researchers within certain academic environments and penalises somewhat mobile ones."

This is very likely to be ascribed to the typical recruitment of European Universities (Spain and Italy for example), in which the "internal" researchers is heavily supported by the local hiring committee. Thus, staying in the same place for (almost) all the career may be a wise decision. Sad thing.

 

 

Paper accepted

New paper accepted: S Vincenzi. Extinction risk and eco-evolutionary dynamics in a variable environment with increasing frequency of extreme events. Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

It should be published online on the 11th of June.

Here is the abstract.

One of the most dramatic consequences of climate change will be the intensification and increased frequency of extreme events. I used numerical simulations to understand and predict the consequences of directional trend (i.e. mean state) and increased variability of a climate variable (e.g. temperature), increased probability of occurrence of point extreme events (e.g. floods), selection pressure, and effect size of mutations on a quantitative trait determining individual fitness, as well as the their effects on the population and genetic dynamics of a population of moderate size. The interaction among climate trend, variability, and probability of point extremes had a minor effect on risk of extinction, time to extinction and distribution of the trait after accounting for their independent effects. The survival chances of a population strongly and linearly decreased with increasing strength of selection, as well as with increasing climate trend and variability. Mutation amplitude had no effects on extinction risk, time to extinction or genetic adaptation to the new climate. Climate trend and strength of selection largely determined the shift of the mean phenotype in the population. The extinction or persistence of the populations in a “extinction window” of 10 years was well predicted by a simple model including mean population size and mean genetic variance over a 10-year time frame preceding the “extinction window”, although genetic variance had a smaller role than population size in predicting contemporary risk of extinction.

New paper published

I got a new paper accepted and published: S Vincenzi, A Piotti (2014). Evolution of serotiny in maritime pine (Pinus pinaster) in the light of increasing frequency of fires. Plant Ecology (still online only) DOI 10.1007/s11258-014-0342-y

And here is the abstract.

Wildfire frequency and intensity in the Mediterranean region are predicted to increase with climate and anthropogenic changes in the following decades. Pines species often posses fire-embracing and fire-avoiding strategies that increase the probability of persistence and performance in fire-prone habitats. One such strategy is serotiny, i.e., the capacity to retain seeds in long-closed cones within the plant canopy; serotinous cones release seeds only when either a fire or a heat shock occurs. In this work, we used a simulation approach and Pinus pinaster populations as a model system to investigate how (i) an increased frequency of fire, (ii) genetic characteristics of serotiny, and (iii) observed differences in life histories interact to determine (a) risk of local population extinction and (b) temporal changes in the prevalence of serotiny in the modeled population. In addition, we tested whether the contemporary evolution of serotiny in the face of increased probability of occurrence of fires increased the probability of population persistence with respect to a scenario in which serotiny was not allowed to evolve. Our simulations showed that over the 300 years of simulated time, the evolution of serotiny did not substantially contribute to the persistence of populations. Extinction risk increased with the increasing probability of occurrence of fire and slightly decreased with (i) higher gene flow from outside the modeled population, and (ii) higher prevalence of serotiny at the beginning of the simulation. The prevalence of serotiny at the end of simulation time was difficult to predict and mostly driven by stochasticity.

Videos of EURAXESS event in New York City

At the end of March 2014, I was invited to present my project funded by a Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship at the EURAXESS event at Columbia University in New York City. The event was very good and all the five contributions were interesting and engaging. Here are the videos of all the presentations (my contribution is here).