It’s hard to imagine that Google was once a humble start-up company like so many others. As of 2015, it was a multinational company of 65,000 employees, raking in over $75 billion dollars in annual revenue, and it’s only grown since! They’ve expanded from a rudimentary search engine to developing mobile devices and laptops, operating systems, and visionary projects like driverless cars and smart contact lenses. It was an arduous trek to the top, but from the struggles emerged lessons about navigating an increasingly technological world. How Google Works is a distillation of some of the key principles and practices that helped Google achieve its success.

Most companies let culture unfurl organically without giving much forethought or guidance to the process, but it’s risky to leave that aspect of company development to fate. There are other areas where freedom to explore and fail is healthy and micromanaging would be stifling, but company culture is something that founders and managers would be wise to pay attention to and be proactive about.

Those companies that ask questions about company culture and values often do not do so until after initial success. What they don’t realize is that by the time a company has found its financial footing, a company culture has already developed—even if it’s implicit. Companies realize this too late, and then they hire a PR representative to come in, observe the company and its structure, and crack the company’s culture code. But these are people from the outside, who weren’t present from the outset. They usually develop a generic manifesto of vague slogans about highly satisfied customers and high quality products that fail to resonate.

This is to be expected when slogans are artificially grafted by fiat from the top. It’s difficult to alter company ethos after the fact. Get ahead of the process and guide it. This involves collaborating early on with your founding team and determining what is most important, what you want the company to embody and deliver. These conversations will create and crystallize a picture of company life, an informal blueprint to remind and reorient.

It is crucial that the founders believe the company’s slogans. Employees detect bull crap from their superiors, so you better be genuine about what you say and write, especially when it comes to company values. Being on board with values improves the chances that a company will attract people with similar goals and ideals. 

A knave is a dishonest or unscrupulous person. Unfortunately, knaves have a way of infiltrating companies—perhaps even yours. Keep an eye out for them in their varying manifestations. Some tend toward arrogance. This is an unfortunate but all-too-real occupational hazard for those enjoying success at the cutting edge. Jealousy in another morale-killer that puts people in a win-loss mindset instead of a win-win mindset. These are just a few examples, but you know the self-absorbed type who can’t seem to play nice. They can become a problem when other employees come to believe that success is achieved only through the adoption of similar tactics. This only augments the knavery.

Knaves are looking out for number one without any regard for the success of the team or the company. Divas, by contrast, are ambitious creatives who, though eccentric—perhaps even annoyingly so—tend to consider the team’s success a critical objective. Avoid the knaves, but the divas are often worth tolerating.

No matter how intricate or conceptually sound it is, count on your strategy being flawed in crucial ways. You will come face to face with these flaws as you attempt to turn theoretical plans into reality. It’s inevitable. What some people mistakenly do is continue to follow the initial plan instead of adapting. This stubbornness is like refusing to patch a leak in your ship’s hull. Having the good sense to patch it up and steer the craft away from the rocks is a vital skill to develop. Those who are more risk-averse will hate the uncertainties that those changes bring, but the flexible “let’s figure this out” mentality will serve a team well.

When Jonathan Rosenberg joined Google in 2002, he was alarmed that there was no written strategy for the company. He immediately tried to put the strategy on paper, but his colleagues strongly discouraged this, and he eventually came to see the wisdom to their thwarting him. There was already a solid strategic foundation—at least spoken—and this had been sufficient since Google’s founding in 1998. The conventional approach of formally putting a strategy on paper with i’s dotted and t’s crossed is to create a relic. It’s destined for irrelevance.

Know the foundational strategic elements—beyond that, just be flexible and ready to change course.

Strategy is important, but perhaps even more important than that is recruiting the talent. Business people lose sight of this: they often attribute success to those scintillating meetings where product development is ironed out.

By contrast, sports coaches understand better that more than meetings and strategies, talent is far more crucial to winning the game. Success depends on recruiting competent players. No matter how good a coach is, how solid his strategy, his little league team will never beat the Red Sox. Strategy is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for success. The key is hiring.

From entry-level positions to senior manager positions, the interview process at Google is extremely rigorous. It’s an investment of time and resources, but finding the best candidate possible typically results in a solid return on investment.

Because the interview and recruiting process can be grueling, those who are higher up delegate the task to underlings, which means they are increasingly removed from the hiring process as they climb the organization’s ladder. This is a terrible mistake. Those toward the top should care the most about who gets hired. 

A common assumption in business circles is that money is the life force of a company. Obviously money is vital for a business to function, but information is also critical to a company’s flourishing—now more than ever in the age of Internet.

An easy flow of information is essential, and yet some executives run their businesses in a hierarchical fashion, reminiscent of Soviet-era bureaucracy, where information slowly works its way down the chain of command, redacted for underlings who further redact the original message until it ends up at the bottom in a diluted, censored form. Being stingy with information is counterproductive. It hurts employee performance because it disempowers and forces them to act on incomplete information, which only hurts the business in the long run.

It is in the best interests of both employees and employers to share as much information as possible, rather than hiding the majority in the vaults. Executives at Google have shared information widely in order to set a precedent for transparency.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt was a personal friend of Steve Jobs and was even on Apple’s board at one time. He stepped down from the board a few years after Google acquired Android in 2005 and it became clear that Google would be developing an operating system that would be in competition would Apple’s iOS. Apple and Google are both creative companies with innovative technologies, but their respective approaches to innovations are radically divergent.

Google has opted for an open-sourced approach to innovation. Anyone—not just the engineers—can access the source code and build applications for the operating system. Android is their sandbox, and they can create what they like. There’s no buy-in or approval required from Google for Average Joe to develop and sell applications.

By contrast, Steve Jobs wanted a hand and final say in every aspect of Apple product development. He didn’t simply tell the board about a new product—rather, he would unveil products in a masterfully theatrical manner. He was a brilliant creative who knew just what he wanted, believed strongly he knew what was best and was almost always right. Jobs is often brought up as a counterexample to Google’s belief in the value of innovation through open-source. So if you consider yourself equal to Steve Jobs in business savvy, technical ingenuity, and uncannily sharp instincts, then, by all means, try the Steve Jobs approach of stringent oversight of innovation. If, however, you are like the rest of humankind, then maybe Google’s approach is worth considering.

Another example of Google’s inclusiveness and innovation is its 70/20/10 idea. 70 percent of the capital is funneled into Google’s core and demonstrably successfully endeavors. 20 percent is devoted to projects that have shown promise and merit further development. The remaining 10 percent is designated for the go-big-or-go-home projects. They’re untested, and most of them will fail, but it will mean huge return on investment for Google if even a few succeed. The more daring experiments never receive more than 10 percent, in part because it would not be sound to dole out too much, but also because it forces engineers to be creative with more limited capital. This is where innovation thrives.

The 20 Percent Project is a long-standing tradition at Google that applies not just to the company-wide structure, but individual engineers as well. It has allowed Google engineers to work on projects on the side that they’d like to pursue. The majority of time is spent on completing the objectives designated, but if there are projects or modifications that Googlers think would add value to the company, they are welcome to go for it as they have time.

Google’s Open Gallery, for example, was the result of one of Jonathan Rosenberg’s 20 Percent Projects. Through a conversation with a museum curator in Jerusalem about the Holocaust, Rosenberg recognized that the remaining survivors are nearing the ends of their lives, and that it would be tragic to lose their firsthand accounts. Rosenberg brought the idea to Israel’s Google squad, which began to devote 20 percent of their time to establishing a relationship with the Museum of Martyrs and developed the website’s online presence. There are almost 150,000 images from the museum now online. This has led to survivors from around the world filling in some of the gaps with their experiences related to the documents and photos in the online archive. This became the first of museums around the world that have posted their collections of artifacts online. It all began with an employee pursuing an area of personal interest that Google’s 20 percent principle allowed for.

These insights are just an introduction. If you're ready to dive deeper, pick up a copy of How Google Works here. And since we get a commission on every sale, your purchase will help keep this newsletter free.