386 Quotes by Eric Schmidt

There are some people who actually enjoy firing. Beware of them. Firing instills a culture of fear that will inevitably fail, and “I’ll just fire them” is an excuse for not investing the time to execute the hiring process well.

Google docs and spreadsheets don’t work if you’re on an airplane. But it’s a technical problem that is going to get solved. Eventually you will be able to work on a plane as if you are connected and, then when you get reconnected to the Internet, your computer will just synchronize with the cloud.

This is why most conference rooms at Google have two projectors. One of them is for videoconferencing with other offices or for projecting meeting notes. The other is for data. When discussing options and opinions, we start the meetings with data. We don’t seek to convince by saying “I think.” We convince by saying “Let me show you.

For a meritocracy to work, it needs to engender a culture where there is an “obligation to dissent”.

Perhaps it’s human nature, or just corporate nature, but most people tend to think incrementally rather than transformationally or galactically.

Smart creatives thrive on interacting with each other. The mixture you get when you cram them together is combustible, so a top priority must be to keep them crowded.

There’s been spying for years, there’s been surveillance for years, and so forth, I’m not going to pass judgement on that, it’s the nature of our society.

Most companies’ culture just happens; no one plans it. That can work, but it means leaving a critical component of your success to chance. Elsewhere in this book we preach the value of experimentation and the virtues of failure, but culture is perhaps the one important aspect of a company where failed experiments hurt.

I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.