Work Rules!
Laszlo Bock, 2016
Work Rules! How Google is changing the way we live and work together by Laszlo Bock, Vahlen, 2016. Laszlo Bock held various management positions at GE and McKinsey, among others, before becoming Vice President of People Operations at Google until 2016. His book provides an exciting insight into the culture of the company and how HR issues are dealt with there. All of Google's HR activities are scientifically scrutinized and developed - and so you will also find many source references in his book that invite you to study them in more depth. In contrast to some other companies, Google does not have the problem of finding candidates with about 30,000 unsolicited applications per year. But at the same time, this high number poses other challenges for the selection systems. What fascinated me was the idea of transparency, which is lived at Google, as some personal conversations with Googlers on the sidelines of a Search Inside Yourself seminar in Berlin confirmed. The principle "Only hire people that are better than you!" can only be underlined. The book gives one a lot of ideas on how to consider personnel selection, promotion, evaluation and employee participation in one's own company. It is exciting to realize that performance is not a normal distribution, but rather a Pareto distribution. Most performance systems are based on the basic assumption of normal distribution. Thus, there is a lot of explosive material in the - scientifically proven - evidence that this basic assumption is probably wrong. We were able to experience this during a discussion at the Denkwerkstatt Symposium 2017. Many organizations are wondering how they should continue to deal with target systems. Some are even doing away with them altogether. Those who do not want to go along with this step will find an exciting alternative in the instrument OKR (Objectives and Key Results). Conclusion: A very readable and stimulating book, which is absolutely recommendable, even if the American culture is certainly not transferable 1 : 1 to German organizations!
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