If you are interested in google or managing (and getting the best out of people) then this book is a must read.
It is a detailed account of how google formed a performance management system that hooked into data driven philosophy to quantify the performance of their staff, this data driven philosophy comes right from the founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and underpins every endeavour the company undertaken to date. It promotes the sanctity of data and the importance of using quantitative as well as qualitative data in performance management of staff.
As we all know, over the past 15 years google have been the poster boy for rapidly expanding businesses.
They promote the habit of putting your best staff under a microsope. By doing this you can build a picture of the important traits and attributes of people in a particular role. You can then use this to seed the recruitment and performance management process to keep the quality of hired staff members high and to promote growth in current staff members.
After you have identified the best individuals in certain areas you have the option for them to train the rest ! For example if you have a manager who is amazingly organised, very rarely misses meetings or deadlines. Talking to him and figuring out his process, and then empowering him to teach others is good for the employee (they feel important) and the other staff members (they can strengthen a weakness).
They also promoted regular coaching of individuals. This would involve regular catchups and setting SMART goals for the individuals. This would support the setting of internally visible OKR‘s (objectives and key results) that employees would work towards. An example of an OKR might be the launch a new product, increase ad venue in a quarter or optimise the efficiency of a search algorithm. OKR’s were introduced to google by John Doerr who is a famous venture capitalist at Kliener Perkins who was an early investor in companies including Google and Amazon.com. He brought the concept over from IBM, they became a bit hit at google and are still used at the company to this day.
John Doerr has also backed BetterWorks. A startup that is attempting to build a set of tools to assist the setting of company wide OKR’s. My understanding is that they have struggled to define their product and its price range and the uptake was low. The company has pivoted in an attempt to reverse their fortunes. Time will tell if they can cash in on the concepts that have helped build companies such as IBM and google.
A few other interesting concepts include:
- The use of checklists as part of processes to reduce cogitative load, for repetitive but complicated tasks.
- Using experiential rewards to award publicly and financial rewards privately
- De-emphasize job titles. The weakest form of staff member is one that is reliant on a job title to lead (see 5 levels of leadership by John C Maxwell)
- Pay unfairly – Pay people what they are worth, not what a job title dictates because an employee’s worth to a company follows a power law distribution not a normal distribution.
- Building a culture/community is in the best interest of a company. It increases motivation, employee happiness, retention and therefore profits
- Mistake proofing – Build systems that are designed to reduce mistakes using the japanese Poka-yoke concept.
MARK CHETTLE 
