How to Coach Yourself and Others Techniques For Coaching | Page 141
Innovation is not something that I just wake up one day and say 'I
want to innovate.' I think you get a better innovative culture if you
ask it as a question."...
Getting the most out of knowledge workers will be the key to
business success for the next quarter century. Here's how we do it
at Google.
At Google, we think business guru Peter Drucker well understood
how to manage the new breed of "knowledge workers." After all,
Drucker invented the term in 1959. He says knowledge workers
believe they are paid to be effective, not to work 9 to 5, and that
smart businesses will "strip away everything that gets in their
knowledge workers' way." Those that succeed will attract the best
performers, securing "the single biggest factor for competitive
advantage in the next 25 years."
At Google, we seek that advantage. The ongoing debate about
whether big corporations are mismanaging knowledge workers is
one we take very seriously, because those who don't get it right will
be gone. We've drawn on good ideas we've seen elsewhere and
come up with a few of our own. What follows are ten key principles
we use to make knowledge workers most effective. As in most
technology companies, many of our employees are engineers, so we
will focus on that particular group, but many of the policies apply
to all sorts of knowledge workers.
1.
Hire by committee. Virtually every person who interviews at
Google talks to at least half-a-dozen interviewers, drawn from
both management and potential colleagues. Everyone's opinion
counts, making the hiring process more fair and pushing
standards higher. Yes, it takes longer, but we think it's worth it. If
you hire great people and involve them intensively in the hiring
process, you'll get more great people. We started building this
p