Talk to Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead like its author wrote you back.
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What it argues
Work Rules! is Laszlo Bock's account of the people management practices he developed as Google's Senior Vice President of People Operations from 2006 to 2016. The book is unusual in the genre because Bock actually ran one of the largest and most analytically rigorous HR organizations in the world, and the practices he describes were tested on tens of thousands of employees over a decade. Where most books about workplace culture are speculative or anecdotal, this one is built on data.
The central argument is that most organizations give managers far too much unchecked authority over hiring, pay, and promotion, and that the result is a systematic perpetuation of bias and mediocrity. Google's response was to strip managers of unilateral control and route major people decisions through committees, calibration panels, and analytic review. Bock describes in detail how structured interviews with predetermined criteria outperform unstructured conversations, how calibration sessions reduce pay disparity, and how post-hire analysis allowed Google to discover which interview questions actually predicted performance.
What it gets right
- 1.
Unstructured job interviews are poor predictors of performance. Structured interviews with predetermined criteria and consistent scoring improve both fairness and predictive validity.
- 2.
Google's Project Oxygen found that the best managers coach, empower rather than micromanage, care about employee well-being, and communicate clearly — technical expertise ranked last among the eight behaviors.
- 3.
Transparency about business strategy and financial performance treats employees as owners, not resources, and tends to produce more responsible behavior than secrecy.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Laszlo Bock served as Senior Vice President of People Operations at Google from 2006 to 2016, during which Google was named the best place to work in the United States more than any other company. He holds degrees from Pomona College and Yale School of Management and previously worked at McKinsey and General Electric. After Google, Bock co-founded Humu, a software company that applies behavioral science and machine learning to workplace improvement. Work Rules!, his first book, draws on research conducted across Google's global workforce of over fifty thousand employees.
