Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

Book by Laszlo Bock

Review by Derik Borden

Google is an organization known for providing employees with benefits and perks that most of us could only imagine. Work Rules written by Laszlo Bock, Google’s former head of People Operations, shares how Google has created a revolutionary work environment and transformed the employee experience. Bock shares both the successes and failures experienced at Google and provides a framework for any organization to easily follow and implement what has worked for Google. 

Here are the work rules discussed in the book:

1. Becoming a founder
2. “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”
3. Lake Wobegon, where all the new hires are above average
4. Searching for the best
5. Don’t trust your gut
6. Let the inmates run the asylum
7. Why everyone hates performance management, and what we decided to do about it
8. The two tails
9. Building a learning institution
10. Pay unfairly
11. The best things in life are free (or almost free)
12. Nudge… a lot
13. It’s not all rainbows and unicorns
14. What you can do starting tomorrow

The lessons shared in this book center on one main theme which is to focus on the employee and the employee’s experience. Often times as leaders we focus on organizational strategies and forget that employees are the driving force behind successful strategies. Organizations don’t have to completely change the way they operate but instead focus on one area because sometimes the smallest change can have the biggest impact.