Management Lessons from Google #3

from BusinessInsider.com 5/12 enhanced by Peter/CXO Wiz4.biz

10. encourage Employee Feedback. Google HR keeps track of employee sentiment through surveys & closely-tracked retention rates plus, unlike other big companies that do similar things, distributes this information widely to managers so they can understand how their departments fare relative to the other groups or the company as a whole. And, of course, all of these HR activities are automated through home-grown web portals and tools so the hassle on managers is lessened.”

11. Have a High Bar for Hiring. “The very high hiring bar is something I came to appreciate the importance. It’s about long term thinking, it’s about sometimes suffering the pain of not having the people in the group that you need desperately, because product management is demanding new features, but you’re really positioning yourself for the long term if you keep the quality bar up, since ultimately the company is the employee base.”

12. Find the “best” Partners, not the biggest Partners for your company. Doing “Due Diligence” doesn’t mean finding the vendor most people use and then negotiating a lower price. When we looked to replace a broken CRM system, we had bought on the cheap, I researched all the vendors in the market and found the one that best fit our needs. Larry told me to forget them and go with a couple of friends of his who were building a CRM product themselves. It wasn’t even in beta yet. I thought he was crazy. He insisted and we brought his friends in to work with us. They spent the next couple of months living in our office, writing code, fixing bugs, and adding features to our specifications.
The end result was a custom system that worked better than anything else in the market. After that, I only looked to large corporate suppliers if I couldn’t find a couple of guys in a garage somewhere who were really smart and really hungry

13. Make sure you have an exciting future. In the end, the number one thing you can do to keep the bar high is to have an exciting future. Easier said than done – to make sure that your future is exciting, especially when you’re competing with companies like Twitter, LinkedIn & Facebook, that also have very exciting futures. That’s why Larry wants to reinvigorate the company in other ways to strive for excellence across many categories.” You can too !!!

Comments: What do you think of these? What have you heard about Google?