Eric Schmidth on team size and self-motivation more
The webcast of Eric Schmidt the chief executive officer of Google actually goes to the technical audience and has a bit of the usual Google employing PR as usual…
- People are allowed to spend 20% of their work time to build their own ideas and projects
- this time is NOT managed, but tracked over the whole company
- the innovation rate of Google is bigger than of any other competitor in the industry - because of this (and the nice workplace, team play, fun at work etc…)
BUT - the important points (quote E Schmidt)
- this won’t work with teams or companies that are used to being said what to do … hence it only works with the great employee quality they hire from
- this won’t work> in large teams - Google’s initial idea was to have only teams of max. 3 people with one UTL >(Uber Team Leader) as a speaker and 4-5 months… today they grew to 4-5 people but still try to keep it <span class=“caps"AS SMALL as possible
- and again this won’t work with the wrong people…
Googler’s are self-motivated ( intrinsical motivated )
Apart from all the interesting points and stories Eric tells about Google (and I encourage you to watch at least the initial 60% of the show) the primary message we get from there again is - it’s only about “PeopleWare”… just as Tom ‘de Marco already wrote ten years ago… (have you read that classic book?)
Primary message:
- People count - find the right ones - Google is spezialized on hiring only Phds from top universities … see what some Googler’s already published
- Slack : people need their space to develop their ideas and self-motivation - see above - 20% of the time boosted Google with Google News, Froogle (Google product search), Google Search history, etc.etc…
- if it doesn’t work you have the wrong people - proceed to step 1
Nice to have confirmed again that the top performing teams> are the teams of small size(3-5 people), the project durations of a few weeks or months and it all comes down to the inital ideas and project work practice in XP, Agile projects or simply *iterative project models*…
Google is a nice case study and public real-life example for that model to work.