xcud/lessons-learned.md

## lessons-learned.md

      
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              lessons-learned.md
            
          
    Lessons Learned – The Hard Way
Eric Schmidt, E&VC Final Class
Transcribed by Abheek Anand
About Management Culture:

You get personal leverage through delegation and empowerment, along with inspection
Hiring defines a company. Review every job offer every time.
Manager (or teams reporting to a manager) should never have the unilateral authority to hire people.
Major decisions should be made in large groups, by two joint owners.
Be careful about goal-misalignment; goaling drives behavior and conflict.
Social groups of workers moderate bad behaviors of individuals.
Meet and find the best decision; drive this to be the consensus. Don’t compromise below the best.
Organize the company around the people whose impact is highest.
Measure everything and ask for the supporting data behind everything.
Beware of managers on power trips; watch out for “I’ll just fire them.”

About People:

Offices should be designed to maximize energy and interactions, not for isolation and status.
Employees care more about passion and success than about money.
Where there is success there is envy.
Learn something new so that you can remember how hard it is to learn.
Understand the employee always has a choice.
All people should work on more than one thing.
Nothing gives you more leverage than hiring a fantastic employee.
People care more about what their peers think than what their bosses think; use this.
Diversity is your best defense against myopia.
There is a fine line between arrogance and self-confidence.
Arrogance is inversely correlated with age. Some harden, however.
Employees want to be paid and treated fairly and to feel that they are appreciated and respected.

About Being a CEO or Leader:

Run a company for the long term; CEO’s goal is to build a 20-year durable institution.
Spend 80% of your time on where the next 80% of your revenue is going to come from.
Demolish a Culture of Fear.
There is never enough communication inside a company.
Sometimes you act, sometimes you wait, sometimes you ignore.
Make sure you would work for yourself.
Trust, but verify.
Publish notes for every meeting.
Repetition does not spoil the prayer.
Be brutal to people who violate the basic interests and threaten the company.
Engineers add complexity, marketing adds management layers, sales adds assistants. Manage this.
Instead of laying off the bottom 10%, don’t hire them!
Run the management training program yourself, and be good at it.

Managing the Business:

If something is growing then it is good and gets more resources and if it’s not, starve it.
Share objectives and performance and snippets weekly.
Promotion should be a peer-reviewed process, not a top-down management decision.
Individual contributors understand the details of their business areas much more thoroughly than management.
The most important attribute in an organization is its ability to get out of the way. This is also true for managers.
Flat organizations increase information flow and empower employees.
Organizations need to concentrate on value, rather than costs.
Trust is your most potent weapon. Never squander it.
None of us is as smart as all of us.