Work Rules - Laszlo Bock

This book describes the general approach to HR followed by Google and the ideals of the prototypical open Silicon Valley company. There's no way to guarantee that your company will deliver a valuable creative product, especially at the level of Google. However, there are some steps companies can take to make it more likely that this will happen.

When you get down to it, we have to ask what we are working for. When you have filled all of the lower tiers on the pyramid, what is it you'd choose to fill the upper tiers? There really are many different answers to this question: create works of art, build bridges, party all the time. The answer depends on the type of person you are, and that is where Work Rules come into play. These are what Google has identified as a general process for making sure that your company can deliver something great for the greater good of society, while it works to fulfill the personal and spiritual needs of the employees who make up your company. With that in mind, here are the 10 Steps that you can do to change your workplace tomorrow:

1. Give your work meaning
   • Make work more than a means to an ends
   • Connect it to an idea that transcends the day-to-day while also relating to your everyday work
   • Whatever you're doing matters to someone
2. Trust your people
   • If you believe that human beings are fundamentally good, then act like it
3. Hire people better than you
   • It's always an error to compromise on hiring quality
   • Hire by committee
   • Setup standards in advance
   • The proof that you're doing well is that 9 out of 10 hires are better than you are
4. Don't confuse development with managing performance
   • Have developmental conversations all the time and separate them from performance (in space and time)
   • The conversation about performance should be about outcomes
5. Focus on the 2 tails
   • Put your best people under a microscope and identify their best traits
   • Find the most specific slice of expertise and use them as examples & teachers
6. Be frugal and generous
   
   • Bring in local vendors. 
   • Focus on the most human moments
7. Pay unfairly
   • Performance is an exponential curve
8. Nudge
   • Subtly change behavior
   • How much you save is the biggest determinant of your personal wealth.. tweaking your savings rates by small amounts can have a huge impact on your wealth at retirement
   • Look around at how your environment is nudging you right now
9. Manage the rising expectations
   • Change requires adaptation
10. Enjoy (then go back to #1 and start again)
    • Workplace improvement is a constant improvement process
    • Learn from your experiments and try again

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Please forward!

Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer

This book was a unique hybrid of personal narrative and self-help book, in which Josh leads you through his personal experiences in the realm of extreme memory sports while simultaneously explaining the memory tricks he learned. I found it to be a unique account in the level of detail it provided into what are normally internal thought processes. Think of how fleeting an experience it is to actually piece together a memory, and yet within its moment, clearly defined. 

While I was recalling this, I thought back to my own experience in reading Josh's personal account of his induction into the memory club, whose name escapes me now, in which he is required to down two pints and then recall an arbitrary list of facts that he had just learned. I remember thinking at the time that it was nearly impossible he would be able to recall the entire experience of learning the list, downing the beers and then trying to recall the list (even failing for the first time). In attempting to recount my feelings about this at the time, I remembered that I had been reading this book as an ebook on my phone, while sitting in bed. 

OK, obviously nobody can recall in that level of detail, and the whole remembering of forgetting poses certain logical problems. Nonetheless it seems a realistic and useful account. The mental tricks are genuinely useful and worth applying. I'll see if I can use them to remember folks' names. 

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