Work Rules!

Author: Bock, Laszlo

• We all want our work to matter. Nothing is a more powerful motivator than to know that you are making a difference in the world.

• Amy Wrzesniewski of Yale University told me people see their work as just a job (“a necessity that’s not a major positive in their lives”), a career (something to “win” or “advance”), or a calling (“a source of enjoyment and fulfillment where you’re doing socially useful work”).

• The way we solve the “backstabbing” problem, for example, is that if you write a nasty email about someone, you shouldn’t be surprised if they are added to the email thread. I remember the first time I complained about somebody in an email and my manager promptly copied that person, which forced us to quickly resolve the issue.

• Fundamentally, if you’re an organization that says “Our people are our greatest asset” (as most do), and you mean it, you must default to open. Otherwise, you’re lying to your people and to yourself.

• These three cultural cornerstones—mission, transparency, voice—were at the forefront of our 2010 discussions of how Google should operate in China.

• Once you’ve chosen to think and act like a founder, your next decision is about what kind of culture you want to create.

• My personal and professional experience is that if you give people freedom, they will surprise, delight, and amaze you. They will also sometimes disappoint you, but if we were perfect we wouldn’t be human. This isn’t an indictment of freedom. It’s just one of the trade-offs.

• Given that over two-thirds of mergers and acquisitions fail to create value when the products and businesses are kept alive,69 there would have to be something special about acqui-hired employees to make this strategy work.

• There’s ample data showing that most assessment occurs in the first three to five minutes of an interview (or even more quickly),70 with the remaining time being spent confirming that bias; that interviewers are subconsciously biased toward people like themselves; and that most interview techniques are worthless.

• In addition to thinking we’re superior interviewers, we convince ourselves that the candidate we select is also above average. After all, we wouldn’t offer them a job otherwise. But there’s a jarring dissonance between the dewy optimism we feel after a great interview and the tepid reality a year later, when we’re assessing his or her performance.

• Do people boast, “I’m in great shape—I spent $500 on my gym membership this month?” The presence of a huge training budget is not evidence that you’re investing in your people.

• The first change is to hire more slowly. Only 10 percent of your applicants (at best!) will be top performers, so you go through far more applicants and interviews.

• Google doesn’t arbitrarily decide in what order ads are presented. Rather, our advertisers bid for the position they want in the list of ads, which can cost from less than a penny to more than $10 per word.

• I agree that blindly hiring for brains and giving them unbounded freedom to do what they will is a recipe for sudden and catastrophic failure. You obviously want to hire the best people, but “best” isn’t defined by a single attribute like intelligence or expertise.

• Each generation of hiring will therefore be a slightly poorer version of the hiring done by the prior generation. As you get bigger, there will also be more temptation to hire a friend or customer’s child to help them out or build the relationship.

• The first step to building a recruiting machine is to turn every employee into a recruiter by soliciting referrals.

• You never get a second chance to make a first impression” was the tagline for a Head & Shoulders shampoo ad campaign in the 1980s.

• The problem is, these predictions from the first ten seconds are useless.

• Psychologists call this confirmation bias, “the tendency to search for, interpret, or prioritize information in a way that confirms one’s beliefs or hypotheses.”

• In other words, most interviews are a waste of time because 99.4 percent of the time is spent trying to confirm whatever impression the interviewer formed in the first ten seconds.

• there’s no correlation between fluid intelligence (which is predictive of job performance) and insight problems like brainteasers, and in part because there is no way to distinguish between someone who is innately bright and someone who has just practiced this skill.

• Unstructured interviews have an r2 of 0.14, meaning that they can explain only 14 percent of an employee’s performance.

• The best predictor of how someone will perform in a job is a work sample test (29 percent). This entails giving candidates a sample piece of work, similar to that which they would do in the job, and assessing their performance at it.

• The second-best predictors of performance are tests of general cognitive ability (26 percent).

• Tied with tests of general cognitive ability are structured interviews (26 percent), where candidates are asked a consistent set of questions with clear criteria to assess the quality of responses.

• It’s too easy in an interview to focus on your needs: You’re busy and need to assess this person as fast as you can. But they’re making a bigger decision than you are. After all, companies have many employees, but a person has only one job.

• We have a strong bias against leaders who champion themselves: people who use “I” far more than “we” and focus exclusively on what they accomplished, rather than how.

• As the psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote: “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”

• In every interview I’ve ever had with another company, I’ve met my potential boss and several peers. But rarely have I met anyone who would be working for me. Google turns this approach upside down.

• we add a “cross-functional interviewer,” someone with little or no connection at all to the group for which the candidate is interviewing.

• A subordinate’s feedback is at least as valuable, if not more so, as a hiring manager’s.

• As has been found in other settings,xxx the “wisdom of the crowds” seemed to apply to making hiring decisions as well.

• Hiring-committee members recuse themselves from weighing in on candidates who would be on their own teams.

• You may have heard the phrase “Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”96 When Lord Acton wrote those words in 1887, he was making a deeper point about leadership.

• There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. That is the point at which… the end learns to justify the means.

• Managers aren’t bad people. But each of us is susceptible to the conveniences and small thrills of power.

• Watch closely next time. As attendees file in, they leave the head seat vacant. It illustrates the subtle and insidious nature of how we create hierarchy.

• We each have experienced the frustration of a controlling manager, and we have each experienced the frustration of managing people who just won’t listen.

• In Japan there’s a saying: Deru kugi wa utareru. “The stake that sticks up gets hammered down.”

• For example, as a practical matter there are really only four meaningful, visible levels at Google: individual contributor, manager, director, and vice president.

• If you want a nonhierarchical environment, you need visible reminders of your values. Otherwise, your human nature inevitably reasserts itself.

• “Jim Barksdale, the legendary CEO of Netscape, in one of these management meetings said, ‘If you have facts, present them and we’ll use them. But if you have opinions, we’re gonna use mine.’ ”

• In a sense, every meeting becomes a Hegelian dialectic, with presenters providing a thesis and the folks in the room providing an antithesis, spurning opinion, questioning facts, and testing which decision is correct.

• One of the core principles of Google has always been “Don’t politick. Use data.”

• Each year, when we surveyed Googlers they told us that the promotion process wasn’t fair because of all the favoritism shown to certain offices, projects, and jobs.

• It turns out that when you present people with reality, they want to get better.

• We used A/B testing, showing evaluators two sets of search results side by side, then watching their behavior and getting their feedback on which results were better.

• We also use one-percent tests, where we roll out a change to one percent of users to see what happens before implementing the change for billions of users.

• Almost any major program we roll out is first tested with a subgroup.

• Why not carve out ten or fifty or a hundred people and try something different? Or try something first with a small group? As they used to say, “If you’re not careful, you may learn something before you’re done.”

• operates somewhat outside the lines of formal management oversight, and always will, because the most talented and creative people can’t be forced to work.

• For example, imagine two engineers performing at the same level, but one was better able to negotiate his salary when he joined Google. Let’s say he had a salary of $100,000peryear,andanotherengineer,whodidn’tthinktonegotiate,hadasalaryof$90,000. Since they performed at the same level, both received a 20 percent bonus. That’s not fair, argued the engineers, because the first person received $20,000inbonus,whilethesecondhadcontributedthesameimpactbutwaspaidonly$18,000. So, at their request, we changed the basis for bonus calculation from actual salaries to the median salary of all people in that job. That ensured that both people received a bonus commensurate with their impact.

• There’s a virtuous cycle here: We take action on what we learn, which encourages future participation, which then gives us an ever more precise idea of where to improve.

• Googlegeist instead focuses on the most important outcome variables we have: innovation (maintaining an environment that values and encourages both relentlessly improving existing products and taking enormous, visionary bets), execution (launching high-quality products quickly), and retention (keeping the people we want to keep).

• The effect has been profound. We’ve been able to anticipate areas where attrition might go up and keep employee turnover consistent and low, through good times and difficult ones.

• In 2007 and 2008, tech Googlers didn’t feel there was enough recognition given to people doing less flashy but important work.

• Rewards were accruing to those who generated the most volume of code, rather than the highest-quality code.

• The Googlers themselves, partnering with People Operations, designed a pilot program in Europe focused on rotating Googlers through various jobs, role-specific business and product training, a two-year personal development plan, and building networks across the world.

• Bureaucracy Busters fixes all the annoying little impediments that make life exasperating.

• The Waste Fix-It is about stamping out small practices that waste money, like having more printers than we need.

• Escalate to the next layer of the company and present the facts. If they can’t decide, escalate again. In our company, eventually Larry Page will break the tie.

• The mistake leaders make is that they manage too much.

• “Micromanagement is mismanagement.… [P]eople micromanage to assuage their anxieties about organizational performance: they feel better if they are continuously directing and controlling the actions of others—at heart, this reveals emotional insecurity on their part.

• Using small pilots allows the most vocal employees to grapple with the complexities of a situation. It’s easy to complain from the sidelines. Being charged with implementing your ideas is often much harder and can moderate more extreme and unrealistic perspectives.

• Edwin Locke and Gary Latham, in their 1990 book A Theory of Goal Setting & Task Performance, showed that difficult, specific goals (“Try to get more than 90 percent correct”) were not only more motivating than vague exhortations or low expectations (“Try your best”), but that they actually resulted in superior performance.

• you expect little, that’s what you’ll get. Richard Bach, the author of the 1970s bestselling novel Jonathan Livingston Seagull, later wrote in Illusions, “Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they’re yours.”

• If you expect little, that’s what you’ll get. Richard Bach, the author of the 1970s bestselling novel Jonathan Livingston Seagull, later wrote in Illusions, “Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they’re yours.”

• As a manager, it can be terrifying to let go of the reins. After all, your career is on the line if something goes wrong.

• Each week Larry asks that People Operations, like other areas of Google, write a short brief about the week before for the entire management team to review.

• What managers miss is that every time they give up a little control, it creates a wonderful opportunity for their team to step up, while giving the manager herself more time for new challenges.

• Our first twenty years are spent being compared to others.

• Performance management as practiced by most organizations has become a rule-based, bureaucratic process, existing as an end in itself rather than actually shaping performance.

• OKRs, or Objectives and Key Results. The results must be specific, measurable, and verifiable;

• If you’re achieving all your goals, you’re not setting them aggressively enough.

• In addition, everyone’s OKRs are visible to everyone else in the company on our internal website, right next to their phone number and office location.

• We adhered to one of the core tenets of medicine: Primum non nocere. First, do no harm.

• We were relieved to see that the loss of “precision” didn’t hurt us.

• The forty-one points created only an illusion of precision.

• And think of how much worse it would be if your rating dropped, and you were told it was because of your performance when in reality it was just measurement error.

• By simply having more rating categories to choose from, Group B unconsciously, inadvertently, and incorrectly decided that they have almost no star performers.

• After much debate and consternation, we’d replaced a rating system that was imprecise and wasteful with a brand-new one that was simpler, more accurate, and required the same amount of time to calibrate ratings.

• The power of calibration in assessing people for ratings is not that different from the power of having people compare notes after interviewing candidates.

• As an employee, I want to be treated fairly. I don’t mind someone being paid more than me if they are contributing more. But if we’re doing the same work and they’re being paid way more, I’ll be mighty unhappy.

• This was an early, small study, but it demonstrated the power of incentives, as well as the debilitating effect of removing the incentives.

• They went on to demonstrate that intrinsic motivation drives not just higher performance, but also better personal outcomes in terms of greater vitality, self-esteem, and well-being.

• As long as ratings are directly linked to pay and career opportunities, every employee has this incentive to exploit the system.

• “Traditional performance management systems make a big mistake. They combine two things that should be completely separate: performance evaluation and people development.

• And I learned what they thought because once a year every Googler receives annual feedback not just from their manager, but also from their peers.

• Now we asked for one single thing the person should do more of, and one thing they could do differently to have more impact.

• Now we asked them to list specific projects, their roles, and what they accomplished. We limited Googlers to 512 characters to describe what they did on each project,123 figuring that if peer reviewers needed to read more explanation than that, they probably didn’t know what the project was.

• To make sure employees’ conversations with their managers were more useful, we developed a one-page handout for them to use during their performance conversation.

• There’s just one other twist. Googlers working in engineering or product management can nominate themselves for promotion.

• Fourth, split reward conversations from development conversations.

• The Lisa Simpson in all of us wants to be evaluated because she wants to be the best. She wants to grow. All you have to do is tell her how.

• Statistically, these phenomena are better described by a “power law” distribution, which is compared to a Gaussian distribution below.

• In fact, human performance in organizations follows a power law distribution for most jobs.

• In a study of over a thousand research analysts at investment banks, Professor Boris Groysberg of Harvard Business School found that “star analysts suffer an immediate and lasting decline in performance” when they move to a new company.131 Their prior success had been dependent on their coworkers, resources available to them, their fit with the company’s culture, and even the personal reputation or brand they had built up.

• We wondered if we should be firing these performers, as many other companies do, but that would have meant culling 20 percent of our employees each year (5 percent each quarter).

• In other words, this isn’t a “shape up or ship out” conversation; it’s a sensitive talk about how to help someone develop.

• Poor performance is rarely because the person is incompetent or a bad person. It’s typically a result of a gap in skill (which is either fixable or not) or will (where the person is not motivated to do the work). In the latter case, it could be a personal issue or a useful sign that there is something bigger wrong with the team that needs to be addressed.

• As I wrote in chapter 2, if you believe people are fundamentally good and worthy of trust, you must be honest and transparent with them.

• More important is to learn from your best performers.xlvii Every company has the seeds of its future success in its best people, yet most fail to study them closely.

• Project Milgram explored the most effective ways to mine social networks for knowledge within Google. (This was named for the same Stanley Milgram who studied obedience. As Jennifer Kurkoski told me: “He conducted the initial small-world experiment, in which randomly chosen individuals in Omaha or Wichita were asked to start a chain of mail with the intended end point being a named individual in Boston. The average number of ‘hops’ for these chains of mail was 5.5, leading to the popular acceptance of the concept of six degrees of separation.”)

• So what was Project Oxygen looking to accomplish? The hypothesis was that manager quality had no impact on team performance.

• Out of more than a thousand managers, only 140 scored in the top 25 percent as individual performers and in Googlegeist. Even fewer, 67, were in the bottom 25 percent for both measures.

• In fact, manager quality was the single best predictor of whether employees would stay or leave, supporting the adage that people don’t quit companies, they quit bad managers.

• The sixty-five people who moved to worse managers scored significantly lower on thirty-four of forty-two Googlegeist items.

• The next year, those moving to better managers saw significant improvements on six of the forty-two items.

• The research showed eight common attributes shared by high-scoring managers and not exhibited by low-scoring managers: The 8 Project Oxygen Attributes Be a good coach. Empower the team and do not micromanage. Express interest/concern for team members’ success and personal well-being. Be very productive/results-oriented. Be a good communicator—listen and share information. Help the team with career development. Have a clear vision/strategy for the team. Have important technical skills that help advise the team.

• Most don’t hold regular 1:1 meetings where they partner with the employee to diagnose problems and together come up with ideas tailored to the employee’s strengths. Most don’t combine praise and areas to work on.

• But if we could reduce good management to a checklist, we wouldn’t need to invest millions of dollars in training, or try to convince people why one style of leadership is better than another.

• Sample UFS Feedback Questionnaire My manager gives me actionable feedback that helps me improve my performance. My manager does not “micromanage” (i.e., get involved in details that should be handled at other levels). My manager shows consideration for me as a person. My manager keeps the team focused on our priority results/deliverables. My manager regularly shares relevant information from his/her manager and senior leadership. My manager has had a meaningful discussion with me about my career development in the past six months. My manager communicates clear goals for our team. My manager has the technical expertise (e.g., coding in Tech, accounting in Finance) required to effectively manage me. I would recommend my manager to other Googlers.

• Even in cases where managers gave employees low performance ratings, the employees didn’t retaliate by dinging the manager in the next Upward Feedback cycle.

• They distribute their reports and then lead a discussion about how to improve their performance, getting advice from their teams. It’s a beautiful inversion of the typical manager-employee relationship.

• In other words, our bottom quartile managers have become almost as good as our average was just two years prior.

• First, it’s an exceptional illustration of what can be learned and accomplished by focusing on the two tails of performance.

• The Upward Feedback Survey replaced gut instinct (“I know I’m a good manager”) with real data (“My team is telling me I could be a better manager”).

• Moreover, addressing the two tails is where you’ll see the biggest performance improvements: There’s little benefit in moving a 40th percentile performer to be a 50th percentile performer, but going from the 5th percentile to the 50th is major.

• The average employee received thirty-one hours of training over the year, which works out to more than thirty minutes each week. Most of that money and time is wasted. Not because the training is necessarily bad, but because there’s no measure of what is actually learned and what behaviors change as a result. Think about it this way.

• Why then is so much invested in corporate learning, with so little return? Because most corporate learning is insufficiently targeted, delivered by the wrong people, and measured incorrectly.

• Ericsson refers to this as deliberate practice: intentional repetitions of similar, small tasks with immediate feedback, correction, and experimentation.

• As we’ll discuss later, most organizations measure training based on the time spent, not on the behaviors changed.

• I had an American-history teacher who had been teaching for twenty-five years but hadn’t changed the content or his delivery for at least twenty. He had twenty-five years of experience, but twenty of them were the same year repeated twenty times. Repetition without feedback, and in his case also without any motivation. He hadn’t improved in two decades.

• Sending your salespeople to the most expensive sales seminars, led by someone who sold products for someone else, is unlikely to revolutionize your sales performance, because the specifics of what your company does matter.

• Consultants tend to have shallow and thirdhand knowledge, often gleaned from a benchmarking report from yet another consultant or from spending a few months with one client or another, rather than from sustained experience.

• “To rid yourself of saying ‘umm’ during a presentation, use physical displacement. Every time you are transitioning, do something small but physical, like moving your pen. Making a conscious effort to move your pen will turn your brain off from using a verbal filler instead.”

• As Becky puts it, “You can automate a lot of things, but you can’t automate relationships.”

• Organizations always seem to have more demand for people development than they can satisfy,

• It’s easy to measure how training funds and time are spent, but far more rare and difficult to measure the effect of training.

• In 1959, Donald Kirkpatrick, who was a professor at the University of Wisconsin and past president of the American Society for Training and Development, came up with a model that prescribed four levels of measurement in learning programs: reaction, learning, behavior, and results.

• Stories key into a human hunger for narrative, rooted in wisdom that’s passed from generation to generation through myths and folklore. They are an essential part of effective teaching.

• Kirkpatrick’s third level of assessment—behavior—is where his framework becomes powerful. He asks to what extent participants changed their behavior as a result of the training.

• For instance, if you ask most salespeople how good they are, they will tell you they are among the best in the business. If you ask their clients, and tell them you will ask their clients, you’ll get a more modest, and honest, response.

• A thoughtfully designed experiment, and the patience to wait for and measure the results, will reveal reality to you.

• As a pragmatic matter, you can accelerate the rate of learning in your organization or team by breaking skills down into smaller components and providing prompt, specific feedback.

• But there’s a deeper reason to have employee-teachers. Giving employees the opportunity to teach gives them purpose. Even if they don’t find meaning in their regular jobs, passing on knowledge is both inspiring and inspirational.

• The ethos in the Valley has long been “Work hard, but don’t show off.”

• It came down to four principles: Pay unfairly. Celebrate accomplishment, not compensation. Make it easy to spread the love. Reward thoughtful failure.

• For example, a top-tier consulting firm might pay a new MBA $100,000peryear,andchargeclients$2,000 per day ($500,000peryear),roughlyfivetimeshersalary.Inthesecondyear,theMBAmightearnbetween$120,000 and $150,000andbebilledat$4,000 per day ($1millionayear),abouteighttimeshersalary.Independentofwhetherornotthisconsultantiscreating$1 million of value for her employer or client, her share of the value she’s creating is dropping each year. This is an extreme example, but it’s a pattern that holds in most professional service firms.

• In fact, economist Edward Lazear of Stanford University has argued that people are on average underpaid relative to their contribution early in their careers, and overpaid later in their careers.

• Why would a company design a system that makes the best and highest-potential people quit? Because they have a misconception of what is fair and lack the courage to be honest with their people.

• Professors Ernest O’Boyle and Herman Aguinis, whom we met in chapter 8, reported in the journal Personnel Psychology that human performance actually follows a power law distribution

• Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his book The Black Swan, made exactly this point, explaining that extreme events were much more likely than most banks’ models assumed.172 As a result, swings and downturns happen far more often than predicted when using a normal distribution, but about as often as you would expect using a power law or similar distribution.

• When rewarding people within our companies, our intuition leads us to make the same mistake that Schmidt made when studying government programmers. We equate the average with the median, assuming that the middle performer is also the average performer.

• As the data show, exceptional contributors perform at a level so far above that of most, that they are able to pull the average up well past the median.

• “Ten percent of productivity comes from the top percentile and 26% of output derives from the top 5% of workers.” In other words, they found that the top 1 percent of workers generated ten times the average output, and the top 5 percent more than four times the average.

• How many people would you trade for your very best performer? If the number is more than five, you’re probably underpaying your best person. And if it’s more than ten, you’re almost certainly underpaying.

• In fact, we have many cases where people at more “junior” levels make far more than average performers at more “senior” levels.

• Once you can assess impact, you can look at your available budget and decide what the shape of your reward curve ought to be. If the best performer is generating ten times as much impact as an average performer, they shouldn’t necessarily get ten times the reward, but I’d wager they should get at least five times the reward.180 If you’re adopting a system like this, the only way to stay within budget is to give smaller rewards to the poorer performers, or even the average ones.

• If you can’t explain to employees the basis for such a wide range of awards, and can’t give them specific ways to improve their own performance to these superb levels, you will breed a culture of jealousy and resentment.

• Compensation systems are based on imperfect information and administered by imperfect people.

• Earlier, the literature maintained that if outcomes were just, people were happy. This was termed distributive justice, meaning that the end distribution of goods, awards, recognition, or whatnot was just. But that wasn’t true in reality.

• The experimental group was even happier about the award than when they received it. The joy of money is fleeting, but memories last forever.

• As Napoleon is purported to have written, though in a more sinister vein: “I have made the most wonderful discovery. I have discovered men will risk their lives, even die, for ribbons!”

• At Google, any employee can give anyone else a $175 cash award, with no management oversight or sign-off required. In many organizations this would be viewed as madness. Wouldn’t employees cut side deals to exchange awards? Wouldn’t they game the system to earn thousands of dollars in extra income? That hasn’t been our experience.

• We’ve found that trusting people to do the right thing generally results in them doing the right thing.

• Finally, it’s also important to reward failure. While incentives and goals matter, the act of considered risk-taking itself needs to be rewarded, especially in the face of failure. Otherwise, people simply won’t take risks.

• As David Cote, the CEO of Honeywell, told Adam Bryant of the New York Times, “The biggest thing I learned [from working as a commercial fisherman when I was twenty-three] was that hard work doesn’t always pay off. If you work on the wrong thing, it doesn’t really matter how hard you work, because it’s not going to make a difference.”

• Wave was later handed to the Apache Software Foundation,190 a nonprofit that develops and distributes free open-source software, and some of the team’s innovations—like live, concurrent editing—became an integral part of other products.

• A year or two after Wave, Jeff Huber was running our Ads engineering team. He had a policy that any notable bug or mistake would be discussed at his team meeting in a “What did we learn?” session.

• If your best person is worth ten of the average people, you must pay “unfairly.” Otherwise, you’re just giving them a reason to quit.

• As Larry often says: If your goals are ambitious and crazy enough, even failure will be a pretty good achievement.

• Ronald Burt, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, has shown that innovation tends to occur in the structural holes between social groups.

• “The usual image of creativity is that it’s some sort of genetic gift, some heroic act.… But creativity is an import-export game. It’s not a creation game.… Tracing the origin of an idea is an interesting academic exercise, but it’s largely irrelevant.… The trick is, can you get an idea which is mundane and well known in one place to another place where people would get value out of it.”

• The Greek geographer Pausanias, who lived from AD 110 to 180, visited the Temple of Apollo in Delphi. He saw a stone in the forecourt inscribed with the Delphic maxim gnothi seauton: Know thyself.

• [Y]our vision is ninety-nine point nine percent garbage.” But it doesn’t feel that way because of saccades: rapid, intermittent movements of your eyes as they flit from one point to another. Your brain “edits out the motion blurs” and creates the illusion of continuous reality.205

• If you still don’t believe me, go to YouTube and type in “selective attention test.” The first result should be a post by the University of Illinois’s Daniel Simons.

• Nordstrom requires sales associates to walk out from behind the counter to hand you your purchase, which makes customers feel more personally cared for (and therefore more likely to keep shopping at Nordstrom).

• People waited as long as twelve hours to see the exhibit in both cities, yet London visitors spent an average of seven minutes inside while in New York—where the museum asked that people limit their visit to ten minutes and even gave a “courtesy tap” on the shoulder to those overstaying—many stayed forty-five minutes or longer. Both cities are similarly cosmopolitan; it doesn’t seem that those in London would be any less interested in art or the rain; and the wait times weren’t different. So what was? The exhibit was free in London, but it cost $25 in New York.

• intrinsic motivation and productivity drop once they started paying people to perform tasks—once you charge for something, people think about it differently. They want to “get their money’s worth.”

• To count as a mere nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid. Nudges are not mandates. Putting the fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not.”

• Some argue that nudges are unethical, forcing people into choices they would not otherwise make or want. But opponents of nudging ignore the reality that someone first made a choice not to put the fruit at eye level.

• I suspect there are two reasons why nudges give some people the heebie-jeebies. First, the specter of lab coat–clad brainiacs secretly influencing us is unsettling.

• Second, people don’t like being reminded of the limits of our free will. Nudges raise all kinds of questions about desire (“Do I want a new Escalade because I need it, or because GM spent $3,100,000,000212 on advertising in 2012?”),lx about choice (Coke had 17 percent of the US market in 2012, compared to 9 percent for Pepsi,213 even though one study using MRI scans showed that people found it hard to tell the difference),214 and even about identity (“If the choices I make are a product of my environment and history, are any of my choices truly free?”).

• Our approach is to take compelling academic findings, mix in some of our own ideas, and then see what happens when you try them on thousands of people going about their daily business. In doing so, and in writing about it, my hope is that others will benefit from our insights, whether you’re a small business or a large one.

• It turns out checklists really do work, even when the list is almost patronizingly simple.

• In almost every aspect of management practice and human relations, each of us believes we are in the top tail. And because we believe that, we continue designing ways to manage people based on gut instinct. The result is that we continue designing average-quality management systems that yield average results.

• We’re borrowing a concept called poka-yoke or “mistake proofing.” It’s a Japanese manufacturing concept, applied by Shigeo Shingo in his work at Toyota in the 1960s,225 that shows up in many modern products. In most cars, failing to fasten your seatbelt causes an alarm to go off, signaling you that there is an error. The iPod Shuffle turns off automatically when you unplug your headphones, preserving the battery. A Cuisinart blender turns on only if the lid is securely locked, preserving your fingers.

• Another challenge we had was that Googlers would often sign up for learning courses and then fail to attend. In the first half of 2012, we had a 30 percent no-show rate, which prevented Googlers on the waitlist from taking courses and caused us to run half-empty classes. We tried four different email nudges, ranging from appealing to our desire to avoid harming others (showing photos of people on the waitlist so enrollees could see who would be harmed by a no-show) to relying on identity consistency (reminding enrollees to be “Googley” and do the right thing).

• I was skeptical when I read this because it seemed too obvious. The secret to being wealthy is just to save more money while you’re young?

• BMI is a measure of the relationship between your weight and your height. It’s not a perfect measure by any means. For example, people with higher than average muscle development can have BMIs that suggest they are overweight, when in reality muscle is denser than other bodily tissues. But it’s a simple-to-calculate starting point. BMI calculators are easy to find online if you want to check yours.

• Rob Rosiello, who ran McKinsey’s Stamford, Connecticut, office while I was there, used to say that the most profitable line in the English language was “Would you like fries with that?”

• looked at whether publishing calorie information in two McDonald’s locations in Manhattan and Brooklyn made any difference in consumption: It didn’t.

• Simply providing information wasn’t enough to change behavior. Customers’ buying habits didn’t change at all, even once they could see that a ten-piece order of Mighty Wings had 960 calories, almost as much as two orders of large fries.240

• In a series of studies, Professors Brian Wansink (Cornell University) and Koert van Ittersum (Georgia Tech) demonstrated that serving-dish size has a powerful impact on food consumption.242 They cleverly illustrated the issue by referencing the Delboeuf illusion, an invention of Belgian philosopher and mathematician Joseph Delboeuf in the late 1860s. The illusion looks like this:243 Illustration modeled on the Delboeuf illusion. In figure 1, are the black circles the same size, or is one larger than the other? What about in figure 2?

• Our assessment of how much we eat and our satiation are heavily shaped by the size of the serving dish. The bigger the dish, the more we eat and the less satisfied we feel.

• Richard Thaler reported on a change the state of Illinois had made to how it managed organ donor registrations.246 In most states, as in Illinois before 2006, when you go to renew your driver’s license you can check a box or fill out a form to indicate that you’d like to donate your organs, should you pass away and someone else be in need of them.

• Ultimately, we are neither entirely rational nor entirely consistent. We’re influenced by countless small signals that nudge us in one direction or another, often without any deep intent behind the nudges.

• Marvin Bower, who became McKinsey’s managing director in 1950, is credited with documenting and shaping the firm’s values in a way that allowed McKinsey to serve its clients with integrity for more than fifty years.

• Entitlement, the creeping belief that just because you receive something you deserve it, is another risk in our approach.

• The group is named for the nineteenth-century mining practice of bringing canaries into coal mines to detect accumulations of toxic gases. Canaries, being more sensitive to the buildup of methane and carbon dioxide, would suffocate long before miners would. A dead canary meant it was time to evacuate.

• Behind the scenes, more was going on. Larry had pulled together the top two hundred or so leaders in the company and explained that we were trying to do too many things at the same time, and as a result weren’t doing any of them as well as we could. He began leading an annual spring cleaning, shutting down products that weren’t gaining traction

• Innovation thrives on creativity and experimentation, but it also requires thoughtful pruning.

• Not every problem can be resolved with data.

• If people are good, they should be free. Work is far less meaningful and pleasant than it needs to be because well-intentioned leaders don’t believe, on a primal level, that people are good.

• I’ve had salespeople tell me “Bad breath is better than no breath,” meaning that they’d rather have the revenue that comes from a mediocre performer in a territory hitting 70 percent of their sales quota than have the territory empty. But it is an error ever to compromise on hiring quality.

• People are happy when you give them what they ask for. People are delighted when you anticipate what they didn’t think to ask for. It’s proof that they’re wholly visible to you as people, not just as workers from whom you’re trying to squeeze productivity.

• As you think about creating your own french fry moments, keep in mind that they are thankless. You rarely get praised for avoiding a problem. It’s why in politics you can never win points by arguing “But the recession would have been so much worse if not for my policies!”

• Most companies, including Google until a few years ago, celebrate promotions but do nothing to reach out to the people who just missed the cut. Which is madness. It takes an hour or two to spot the folks you think will be upset and talk to them about how to continue growing.

• M. Muraven and R. F. Baumeister, “Self-Regulation and Depletion of Limited Resources: Does Self-Control Resemble a Muscle?” Psychological Bulletin 126, no. 2 (2000): 247–259.