Google‘s Ten Golden Rules for KM

Getting the most out of knowledge workers will be the key to business success for the next quarter century. According to Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, attracting and holding on to the best performers is "the single biggest factor for competitive advantage in the next 25 years." The ongoing debate about whether big corporations are mismanaging knowledge workers is one Google takes very seriously, because those who don‘t get it right will be gone. What follows are ten key principles Google uses to make knowledge workers most effective. As in most technology companies, many of Google‘s employees are engineers, so the company focuses on that particular group, but many of the policies apply to all sorts of knowledge workers. 1. Hire by committee. Virtually every person who interviews at Google talks to at least half-a-dozen interviewers, drawn from both management and potential colleagues. Everyone‘s opinion counts, making the hiring process more fair and pushing standards higher. 2. Cater to their every need. As Peter Drucker said, the goal is to "strip away everything that gets in their way." Google provides a standard package of fringe benefits, but on top of that are first-class dining facilities, gyms, laundry rooms, massage rooms, haircuts, carwashes, dry cleaning, commuting buses - just about anything a hardworking engineer might want. 3. Pack them in. Almost every project at Google is a team project, and teams have to communicate. The best way to make communication easy is to put team members within a few feet of each other. The result is that virtually everyone at Google shares an office. 4. Make coordination easy. Because all members of a team are within a few feet of one another, it is relatively easy to coordinate projects. In addition to physical proximity, each Googler e-mails a snippet once a week to his work group describing what he has done in the last week. This gives everyone an easy way to track what everyone else is up to, making it much easier to monitor progress and synchronize work flow. 5. Eat your own dog food. Google workers use the company‘s tools intensively. The most obvious tool is the Web, with an internal Web page for virtually every project and every task. They are all indexed and available to project participants on an as-needed basis. Google also makes extensive use of other information-management tools, some of which are eventually rolled out as products. For example, one of the reasons for Gmail‘s success was that it was beta tested within the company for many months. 6. Encourage creativity. Google engineers can spend up to 20 percent of their time on a project of their choice. There is, of course, an approval process and some oversight, but basically Google wants to allow creative people to be creative. One of its not-so-secret weapons is its ideas mailing list: a companywide suggestion box where people can post ideas ranging from parking procedures to the next killer app. The software allows for everyone to comment on and rate ideas, permitting the best ideas to percolate to the top. 7. Strive to reach consensus. Modern corporate mythology has the unique decision-maker as hero. Google adheres to the view that the "many are smarter than the few," and solicits a broad base of views before reaching any decision. At Google, the role of the manager is that of an aggregator of viewpoints, not the dictator of decisions. Building a consensus sometimes takes longer, but always produces a more committed team and better decisions 8. Don‘t be evil. Much has been written about Google‘s slogan, but the company really tries to live by it, particularly in the ranks of management. As in every organization, people are passionate about their views. Google fosters an atmosphere of tolerance and respect, not a company full of ‘yes‘ men. 9. Data drive decisions. At Google, almost every decision is based on quantitative analysis. Google has built systems to manage information, not only on the Internet at large, but also internally. Google employs dozens of analysts who go through the data, analyze performance metrics and plot trends to keep us as up to date as possible. Google has dozens of online "dashboards" for every business to provide up-to-the-minute snapshots. 10. Communicate effectively. Every Friday Google has an all-hands assembly with announcements, introductions and questions and answers. This allows management to stay in touch with what the knowledge workers are thinking and vice versa.