Eric Schmidt on Management at Google

Eric Schmidt speaks at the Management Lab Summit on May 29, 2008 in Half Moon Bay, California. Conversation with Professor Gary Hamel.

• “The culture can be thought of as a ship and iterate culture with transparency for what people are doing. And that model scales pretty well.”
• “I have two jobs, two roles. The first is to make sure every issue that is important is really debated to find, not the common outcome, but the best decision… second thing is to put pressure to make it happen quick.”
• “it [managing better] starts with listening, it has to do with curiosity“
• “everything has to be based on some fact”
• “It’s only about the people.” [respect for people is critical, Google really acts as though the people are their most important asset – John].
• “What is the number 1 goal of the company? It is end user happiness with search. What is the number 2 goal? It’s end user happiness with advertising. What is the number 3 goal? The construction of the Google network of partners to effectuate the first two. What is the number 4 goal? To grow and scale the business… You will eventually get extraordinary returns for your shareholders and maximize advertiser happiness if all those things happen… There are a lot of business executives that get confused on what the goal is and they think that shareholder value is the goal. Shareholder value is a consequence of the goal.”

Related: Eric Schmidt Podcast on Google Innovation and Entrepreneurship – Interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt – Innovation at Google – Google: Experiment Quickly and Often – Marissa Mayer Webcast on Google Innovation – Google Management by Gary Hamel – Larry Page and Sergey Brin Interview Webcast