Book Review: “Work Rules!” by Laszlo Bock

My first moments with the book, when “researching” it online after a brief recommendation, were slightly problematic. The book’s title doesn’t say a lot. Its subtitle — “Insights from inside Google that will transform how you live and lead” doesn’t say much more. Actually, the subtitle turned out to be a little bit misleading for me. I looked at the book from my own, an engineering manager's, perspective and I expected it to be about managing engineering teams (Google, right?), about best practices, and processes that an engineering leader could apply in daily life at work. I didn’t find it in the book but in the end, I am not disappointed!

What we are actually getting in the book is at least as valuable and is for sure not limited to engineering organizations. The main theme of the book is an employee journey at Google, lessons learned from this journey, and how we can apply these lessons in our organizations. We start with reading about the recruitment processes at Google, then we get an overview of their philosophy for empowering people at work and we finish the ride by reading about practices for performance evaluation. The author tells us also how the stages of this journey evolved over time, what mistakes have been made in the past, and where the organization ended up. All of this comes together with real-life stories and examples which, I admit, makes the reading experience really good.

Now, who is this book actually for? This question is a little bit tricky as it has more than one answer. A simple one would go more or less as follows: C-level, department directors, HR people — I don’t have any doubts that this is a must-have read for you. But we are getting from the book much more than HR stuff. We also read there about Google’s culture, the company’s philosophy for motivating and growing people, we learn techniques for improving people’s consistency and performance. And this suddenly makes the book more interesting to the lower management, team leads too.

But there is even more to that. It is also a book about the early days of Google, one of the most successful software development organizations in history. So in the end, it might make this book interesting to anyone in the software development industry who wants to know more about it than just the latest news about changes in the favorite programming language or a library.

Work Rules! by Laszlo Bock

Let me now dive a little bit deeper and discuss the book’s structure. Roughly speaking, it has been organized into four parts (the titles below are from me):

• Introduction. The author starts the book by telling us about the early days of Google, explains the company’s culture, and clarifies why the things covered in the book could work for any organization.
• Employee Journey. In this part, we learn about Google’s practices for recruitment, performance management (motivation and growth), and performance evaluation. We not only learn about the current state of the affairs but we also read about the mistakes and successes experienced on the way to where they are at the moment.
• Conclusions. In the (almost) last part of the book, we get a really honest summary of what went well and what went not so well on the way to where the company is now. The whole thing finishes with a chapter full of actionable advice that can be taken and applied at work on the people management front.
• Afterword. In the closing part of the book, the author explains his philosophy for building an HR (or following the author’s words — People Operations) department. We get here a formula for staffing the department and basic principles for running it. Quoting the author, this part is “for HR Geeks Only”.

I need to admit that the book starts slowly. One might think at first that we are going to get some kind of marketing praise on Google. In the end, it turns out to be untrue, but I believe this is the author’s mistake because some people can drop off while reading the first chapters. These were my thoughts, at least.

But going further the book gets better and better. As you saw above, we read about the employee journey where we do get very insightful content. We go through chapters where we learn about Google’s successes and mistakes, and in the end, we get actionable advice telling us how to apply the knowledge that we just gathered in our daily job as people managers. The structure is clear, the content is insightful, actionable, and fun to read.

Summarizing, I strongly recommend reading this book but with a warning to double-check if you are the right audience for it (see again my remarks about it in the first part of the review, if you just skimmed through it). And if you decide that the book is indeed for you, there is nothing else for me here to do than to wish you a fun reading it. Enjoy!