From

WORK RULES!
Insights from Inside Google That Will
Transform How You Live and Lead
By
Laszlo Bock
Chapter 6

Let the Inmates Run the Asylum

Take power from your managers and
trust your people to run things
Does your manager trust you?
Im sure she doesnt hide her jewelry when you enter the room, but if
you thought you were ready for a promotion, could you promote
yourself? If you wanted to spend one day a week working on a side
project or organizing lectures for other employees, and you figured out
a way to still get your job done, could you? Is there a limit to how
many sick days you can take?
Just as important, do you trust your manager? Does she sponsor and
fight for you and help you get work done? If youre thinking about
taking another job, can you talk to her about it?
This is the kind of manager wed all love to have, but few of us have
actually enjoyed. At Google, we have always had a deep skepticism
about management. This is just how many engineers think: Managers

are a Dilbertian layer that at best protects the people doing the actual
work from the even more poorly informed people higher up the org
chart.
But our Project Oxygen research, which well cover in depth in chapter
8, showed that managers in fact do many good things. It turns out that
we are not skeptical about managers per se. Rather, we are profoundly
suspicious of power, and the way managers historically have abused it.
A traditional manager controls your pay, your promotions, your
workload, your coming and going, whether you have a job or not, and
these days even reaches into your evenings and weekends. While a
manager doesnt necessarily abuse any of these sources of power, the
potential for abuse exists. Our anxieties about toxic bosses show up
everywhere in the culture, from Michael Scott on The Office to the
recent flood of books like The No A**hole Rule and A**holes Finish
First (the first teaches how to survive working with jerks and the latter
how to be one).
When I worked at GE, I knew a senior executive Ill call Ellen. Ellen
had fast-tracked through GE and been rewarded with a top job. One
morning, Ellen breezed into her office and dropped a small paper bag
on her secretarys desk. Lisa, can you run this to my doctors office? I
have to give him a stool sample. The bag contained a still-warm piece
of Ellens morning production.
Ellen didnt see anything wrong with what she had done. She was a
busy executive, and having her secretary haul her excrement around
town simply made Ellen more efficient.
You may have heard the phrase Power corrupts; absolute power
corrupts absolutely. When Lord Acton wrote those words in 1887, he
was making a deeper point about leadership. He was arguing with
Mandell Creighton, a historian and bishop of the Church of England,
who was writing a history of the Inquisition that some- what absolved
the pope and king of responsibility. Acton made an even more forceful
argument than most know:

I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and

King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that
they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the
other way against holders of power, increasing as the power
increases....Great men are almost always bad men, even
when they exercise influence and not authority: still more
when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of
corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that
the office sanctifies the holder of it. That is the point at
which the end learns to justify the means.
Acton isnt just making some academic observation that power
corrupts. Hes shouting that those in authority must be held to even
higher standards than the rest.
Against this backdrop, Ellens actions are less surprising. After all,
hadnt she worked hard and sacrificed to earn that senior executive
title? Surely she was so busy that if her secretary could save her even
fifteen minutes, it would be worthwhile for GE, as Ellen could channel
that precious time into creating more shareholder value? And if it
spilled from a professional need to a personal one, well, Ellen
frequently did GEs work on her personal time. Helping her personally
wasnt that different from helping her professionally, right?
Wrong.
Managers arent bad people.
But each of us is susceptible to the conveniences and small thrills of
power.
At the same time, responsibility for creating (and fighting!) hierarchy
doesnt fall solely on the shoulders of managers. We employees often
create our own hierarchies.
One of the challenges we face at Google is that we want people to feel,
think, and act like owners rather than employees. But human beings are
wired to defer to authority, seek hierarchy, and focus on their local

interest. Think about meetings that you go to. Id wager that the most
senior person always ends up sitting at the head of the table. Is that
because they race from office to office, scurrying to be there first so
they can seize the best seat?
Watch closely next time. As attendees file in, they leave the head seat
vacant. It illustrates the subtle and insidious nature of how we create
hierarchy. Without instruction, discussion, or even conscious thought,
we make room for our superiors.
I see this even at Google, but with a twist. Some of our most senior
leaders are attuned to this dynamic, and have tried to break it by sitting
at the center of a conference table, along one of the sides. Kent Walker,
our general counsel, regularly does so. In part its to create a King
Arthurs Round Table dynamicless hierarchical and more calculated
to draw people into a conversation with each other rather than a series
of back-and-forth exchanges with me.
Invariably, within a few meetings, thats the seat that ends up left open.
Humans turn out to be awfully good rule followers. Before 2007, the
hiring policy at Google was Hire as many great people as you can. In
2007, we introduced hiring budgets because we were hiring more
people than we could absorb. Each team now had a finite number of
people they could hire each year. I was stunned by how quickly we
shifted from an abundance mentality to one of scar- city, as jobs
became a precious resource that had to be conserved. Roles would be
held open longer than ever because teams wanted to be sure they were
getting the best person. Internal transfers became more difficult
because they required an open headcount slot.
It works a bit better now. We addressed some of these challenges by
changing the rules so some teams could go over budget if they needed
tofor example, if a Googler wanted to shift over from another team.
Most leaders keep a reserve budget as well, so that they always have
room for an exceptional hire. But what struck me at the time was that
even at a company that aspires to give people so much freedom, the
introduction of simple rules caused large changes in behavior.

The best Googlers apply their own judgment and break the rules when
it makes sense. To take a trivial example, we limit Googlers to bringing
two guests to our cafs per month. If someone occasionally brings both
their parents and their kids, thats fine. Its better that they all have a
great experience once in a while than that they conform to a rule.
Now, budgets may seem different. The whole point of a budget is that
youre supposed to stay within it. But at Google you should always,
always make room for a truly exceptional person, even if it puts you
over budget. And yet many of us have such a built-in respect for
following norms that it feels revolutionary to suggest that.
Stanley Milgrams controversial experiments at Yale in the 1960s made
the same point, but more strenuously. Milgram was exploring the
question How could the Holocaust have happened? How was it
possible that millions of people were murdered not in spite of society,
but with the passive and active support of it? Are human beings so
susceptible to authority that they would commit the most
unconscionable acts?
Presented as a memory experiment, subjects were told to administer
shocks to a hidden learner if the learner failed to remember the words
they were taught. For each failure, the subject would be told to flip a
switch increasing the voltage by 15 volts, rising from 15 to 420 volts,
with two final switches labeled XXX and corresponding to 435 and 450
volts. At each increment, the subject would hear recordings of the
learner shouting, then screaming. At 300 volts, the learner would start
pounding on the wall and complaining about his heart condition. After
315 volts, the learner would fall silent. The experiment would be halted
when the subject refused to flip any more switches, or after he had
shocked with 450 voltsin some versions of the experiment up to three
times. It took thirty-one shocks to get to that point.
In Milgrams first experiment, forty men participated as subjects.
Twenty-six of them went all the way to 450 volts. After the first
nineteen shocks, the learner went dead silent. Yet 65 percent of
participants kept following orders, administering twelve shocks even

after the learner had become completely unresponsive. And of the

fourteen who didnt progress all the way, not one asked that the
experiment be stopped, or even went to check on the victim without
first asking permission.
(A key fact here is that no one was actually electrocuted. The switches
didnt do anything, and the screaming was prerecorded.)
Managers have a tendency to amass and exert power.
Employees have a tendency to follow orders.
Whats mind-blowing is that many of us play both roles, manager and
employee, at the same time. We each have experienced the frustration
of a controlling manager, and we have each experienced the frustration
of managing people who just wont listen.
At this point youre probably thinking, Wow, things got pretty dark all
of a sudden.
There is hope.
Does your manager trust you? is a profound question.
If you believe people are fundamentally good, and if your organization
is able to hire well, there is nothing to fear from giving your people
freedom.
Remember that the primary definition of asylum is a place of
refuge. One of the nobler aspirations of a workplace should be that its
a place of refuge where people are free to create, build, and grow. Why
not let the inmates run the asylum?
The first step to mass empowerment is making it safe for people to
speak up. In Japan theres a saying: Deru kugi wa utareru. The stake
that sticks up gets hammered down. Its a warning to conform.
This is why we take as much power away from managers as we can.
The less formal authority they have, the fewer carrots and sticks they

have to lord over their teams, and the more latitude the teams have to
innovate.
From the book WORK RULES!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform
How You Live and Lead. Copyright (c) 2015 by Laszlo Bock. Reprinted by permission
of Twelve/Hachette Book Group, New York, NY. All rights reserved.