Thirty One. Work Rules by Laszlo Bock
2015, Twelve, 416 pages. Written in English, read in English.
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Laszlo Bock, the author of this book, is currently the CEO of a company called Humu. This book is, to a certain extent, a short history of how he got there. But it is primarily, and has become a bestseller because of, a breakdown of how Google handles its people and their betterment, because Bock’s previous role was Google’s head of HR, from a very early stage of the company — or, as the company has chosen to title it, the Senior Vice President of People Operations.
If you put the double entendre aside, the book title is apt — through the course of fourteen chapters, the book provides a number of rules for making your workplace, in any capacity that you can, better. These include, for example, a fairly conclusive explanation of Google’s philosophy of providing the kind of benefits that have aggravated opponents of the Silicon Valley culture in general and Google in particular, and have been ridiculed by TV shows — in Bock’s mind all of the provided benefits are not an attempt to be a golden cage for the employees, but a way of taking care of everything that they need, in order to focus on having great ideas and acting on them.
Bock takes the reader through the whole process of becoming an employee in Google — from recruitment, through onboarding, through daily work and even including unfortunate predicaments, such as employee deaths and how the company handles these in terms of compensation and help for the employees’ families. He includes explanations of how Google defines its goals through OKRs, how it measures its employees’ performance, how it has tried to figure out what makes for good managers, and how actual data science drives every decision that the company makes.
Given that Bock has resigned from his position less than a year after the book was published to start his own company, this has not been written as a long winded recruitment pamphlet for Google (not that it needs one), and therefore is not read as one. It’s read as a sincere attempt by an executive who has dedicated his professional life to improve the way employees take part in companies, and has been so passionate about it, that not only did he write a book detailing everything he wanted other companies to learn from Google, he also started a whole company to make sure that other companies benefit from his experience and knowledge.
