Eric Schmidt Quotes

If you believe that the qualities defining you are carved in stone, you will be stuck trying to prove them over and over again, regardless of the circumstances. But if you have a growth mindset, you believe the qualities that define you can be modified and cultivated through effort.

The funny thing about advertising is that it's not a zero-sum game ... Historically, in the digital ad world, pie has gotten larger and it's possible for everyone to win, and it's perfectly possible that will continue to be true for quite some time.

Stop being an idiot; all that matters is growth.

If I give you a penny, then you're a penny richer and I'm a penny poorer, but if I give you an idea, then you will have a new idea but I'll have it too.

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

information is costly to produce but cheap to reproduce.

What is your technical insight?

You should never be able to reverse engineer a company's organizational chart from the design of its product. Can you figure out who reigns supreme at Apple when you open the box for your new iPhone? Yes. It's you, the customer; not the head of software, manufacturing, retail, hardware, apps, or the Guy Who Signs the Checks. That is exactly as it should be.

Knaves are not to be confused with divas. Knavish behavior is a product of low integrity; diva-ish behavior is one of high exceptionalism. Knaves prioritize the individual over the team; divas think they are better than the team, but want success equally for both. Knaves need to be dealt with as quickly as possible.

Android is ahead of the iPhone now,

Make sure you would work for yourself.

I leave out the parts that people skip.

Twitter can no more produce analysis than a monkey can type out a work of Shakespeare.

In many countries adult pornography legislation is an attempt to legislate something else.

Mobile is the future and there's no such thing as communication overload

Technology will move faster than governments, so don't legislate before you understand the consequences

Amazon has well passed any expectations of its ability to change distribution and marketing.

Just remember when you post something, the computers remember forever

If you're going to make a law, make a law that actually works. It's extraordinarily difficult.

I think it's pretty clear that the Internet as a whole has not had a strong notion of identity. And identity means, 'Who am I?' Fundamentally, what Facebook has done has built a way to figure out who people are.

None of us is as smart as all of as

The policy of America to deny visas to technically trained people in the U.S. and shipped to other countries, where they create companies that compete with America, has to be the stupidest policy of all the U.S. government policies.

You have to fight for your privacy or you lose it.

The core problem is that the world is full of people who would like to take 99 per cent of the information that's on the Internet, and eliminate 1 per cent. Everyone has their own thing they don't like.

product excellence is now paramount to business success - not control of information, not a stranglehold on distribution, not overwhelming marketing power (although these are still important). There are a couple of reasons for this. First, consumers have never been better informed or had more choice.13 It used to be that companies could turn poor products into winners by dint of overwhelming marketing or distribution strength. Create an adequate product, control the conversation with a big marketing budget, limit customer choice, and you could guarantee yourself a good return.

I spend most of my time assuming the world is not ready for the technology revolution that will be happening to them soon,

Leadership requires passion.

And the more broadband we can get globally, the better. It's better for the world; it's better for our advertisers; it's better for Google.

It should go without saying - but it usually doesn't, so we'll say it - that data is best understood by those closest to the issue, which is often not management. As a leader, it is best not to get lost in details you don't understand, but rather trust the smart people who work for you to understand them.

Establishing a successful hiring culture that delivers a steady stream of outstanding people starts with understanding the role of recruiters in sourcing candidates. Hint: It isn't their exclusive realm.

In the inevitable showdown between speed and quality, quality must prevail.

The Internet is the largest experiment involving anarchy in history.

The tendency of a CEO, and particularly (speaking from experience) of a new CEO trying to make an impact in a founder-led company, is to try to make too big an impact. It is hard to check that CEO ego at the door and let others make decisions, but that is precisely what needs to be done.

Since I have access to every, every crisis in the world because it's always blaring at me on cable television, that doesn't mean I have to worry about every one of them. This is also known as knowing where the off button is.

If you could trade the bottom 10 percent of your team for new hires, would your organization improve? If so, then you need to look at the hiring process that yielded those low performers and see how you can improve it.

Of course smart people know a lot and can therefore accomplish more than others less gifted. But hire them not for the knowledge they possess, but for the things they don't yet know.

It's a mistake to predict the size of markets that are so new. This model has shown no signs of slowing down. So we are going to get as much of it as we possibly can, and when we get close to that we'll figure out other problems.

Around 400 million people in the last year got a smartphone. If you think that's a big deal, imagine the impact on that person in the developing world.

Twitter is not a technology company, it is a publishing company.

In our case, we focus on quality, and we have a very simple model. If we show fewer ads that are more targeted, those ads are worth more. So we're in this strange situation where we show a smaller number of ads and we make more money because we show better ads. And that's the secret of Google.

Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.

creativity loves constraints.

To me, what you want to do is find a way to let this play out between the virtual world and the physical world ... Ultimately, I think society will get there. It will be messy, but we'll get there.

The thing that people seem to miss about not just Google, but also our competitors, Yahoo, eBay and so forth, is that there's an awful lot of communities that have never been served by traditional media.

You have done all this work to create a hiring process that brings in all these awesome smart creatives, and how do they pay you back? By leaving!! That's right. News flash: When you hire great people, some of them may come to realize that there is a world beyond yours. This isn't a bad thing, in fact it's an inevitable by-product of a healthy, innovative team. Still, fight like hell to keep them.

I use Google+, and I find the quality of the comments are very sophisticated because there is more trust inside of Google+ than there is inside of Twitter and Facebook, for example.

It's very difficult for governments to dominate the Internet because it's so difficult to control. People want to be free. People want to hear multiple voices. They want to make their own decisions. And people who see things will report things.

The business world traditionally rewards people for being closer to the top (case in point: outrageous CEO salaries) or for being closer to the transactions (investment bankers, salespeople).

Steve Jobs told the Macintosh team that real artists ship.

No matter what a person's job is, they should be encouraged to have opinions about the business, industry, customers and partners,

Do not be afraid to fail, but also, do not be afraid to succeed.

The building block of organizations should be small teams. Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder, at one point had a "two-pizza team" rule,41 which stipulates that teams be small enough to be fed by two pizzas.

You can attract the best smart creatives with factors beyond money: the great things they can do, the people they'll work with, the responsibility and opportunities they'll be given, the inspiring company culture and values, and yes, maybe even free food and happy dogs sitting desk-side.

Give the wrong people a big challenge, and you'll induce anxiety. But give it to the right people, and you'll induce joy.

If you look at the history of technology over a couple hundred years, it's all about time compression and making the globe smaller. It's had positive effects, all the ones that we know. So we're much less likely to have the kind of terrible misunderstandings that led to World War I, for example.

We say we're stubborn on vision and flexible on details.

One advantage of hierarchical, process-laden organizations is that it's easy to figure out with whom you need to talk: Just look for the right box on the right chart, and you've got your person. But the steady state of a successful Internet Century venture is chaos.

It's because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional resources.

He showed a video of a seemingly crazy man dancing all by himself at an outdoor concert. The man stands on the side of a hill, shirtless and barefoot, gesticulating wildly and having the time of his life.

General Electric CEO Jack Welch said in Winning: No vision is worth the paper it's printed on unless it is communicated constantly and reinforced with rewards.

I'm able to bring business expertise but, more importantly, operating experience. The people here at Google are young. Every day there are lots of new challenges. I keep things focused. The speech I give everyday is: "This is what we do. Is what you are doing consistent with that, and does it change the world?"

Crazy enough to think you will succeed, but sane enough to make it happen.

Continuous scans of the brain to measure changes in blood flow) could control a robot hundreds of miles away just by imagining moving different parts of his body. The subject could see from the robot's perspective, thanks to a camera on its head, and when he thought about moving his arm or his legs, the robot would move correspondingly almost instantaneously. The possibilities of thought-controlled motion, not only for "surrogates" like separate robots but also for prosthetic limbs, are particularly exciting in what they portend for mobility-challenged or "locked in" individuals - spinal-cord-injury patients, amputees and others who cannot communicate or move in their current physical state.

The Internet of things will augment your brain.

When a CEO looks around her staff meeting, a good rule of thumb is that at least 50 percent of the people at the table should be experts in the company's products and services and responsible for product development. This will help ensure that the leadership team maintains focus on product excellence. Operational components like finance, sales, and legal are obviously critical to a company's success, but they should not dominate the conversation.

Google is very much a not-invented-here, build-it-ourselves culture.

We are certain that for every one of these rock stars we meet in our daily work, there are dozens or even hundreds more who are doing their best to unseat us from our perch. Maybe all of them will fail, but probably not. Probably, somewhere in a garage, dorm room, lab, or conference room, a brave business leader has gathered a small, dedicated team of smart creatives. Maybe she has a copy of our book, and is using our ideas to help her create a company that will eventually render Google irrelevant. Preposterous, right? Except that, given that no business wins forever, it is inevitable. Some would find this chilling. We find it inspiring.

Search companies, which I won't mention by name, tried to do so many things at the same time, they forgot all about search. They either missed the next revolution of search or they created an opening for a Google to enter.

One of the unintended negative consequences of online advertising has been the loss of value in traditional classifieds. It's simply quicker, simply easier for an end user who's online, on a broadband connection, to look things up and to figure out what they want to buy.

When you use Google, do you get more than one answer? Of course you do. Well, that's a bug. We have more bugs per second in the world. We should be able to give you the right answer just once. We should know what you meant.

Meetings should have a single decision-maker/owner. There must be a clear decision-maker at every point in the process, someone whose butt is on the line. A meeting between two groups of equals often doesn't result in a good outcome, because you end up compromising rather than making the best tough decisions. Include someone more senior as the decision-maker. The decision-maker should be hands on. He or she should call the meeting, ensure that the content is good, set the objectives, determine the participants, and share the agenda (if possible) at least twenty-four hours in advance. After the meeting, the decision-maker (and no one else) should summarize decisions taken and action items by email to at least every participant - as well as any others who need to know - within forty-eight hours.

If you thought when you got your job at 20 that it would never change you were misinformed. Retrain yourself to be curious.

Marissa Mayer, who became one of Silicon Valley's most famous working mothers not long after she took over as Yahoo's CEO in 2012, says that burnout isn't caused by working too hard, but by resentment at having to give up what really matters to you.

The best thing that would happen is for Facebook to open up its data. Failing that, there are other ways to get that information,

We used to think that the enterprise was the hardest customer to satisfy, but we were wrong. It turns out, consumers are harder than the enterprise because the consumer will not give you a second chance.

Our colleague Ellen West related a story to us that was told to her by a member of the Gayglers (Google's diversity group for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender employees). He told Ellen that the Gayglers had discussed whether or not Google could be considered the first "post-gay" company at which they had worked. The consensus was that it was close, since at Google "it doesn't matter who you are, just what you do." Bingo.

We want to make sure the thing you're looking for is on Google 100 percent of the time.

In practice, ship and iterate means that marketing programs and PR pushes should be minimal at launch. If you are in the restaurant business, you call this a soft opening. When you push the babies out of the nest, don't give them a jetpack or even a parachute - let them fly on their own. (Note: This is a metaphor.) Invest only when they get some lift. Google's Chrome is a great example of this - it launched in 2008 with minimal fanfare and practically no marketing budget and gained terrific momentum on its own, based solely on its excellence. Later, around the time the browser pushed past seventy million users, the team decided to pour fuel on the fire and approved a marketing push (and even a TV advertising campaign). But not until the product had proven itself a winner did it get fed.

Sheryl Sandberg: "It is the ultimate luxury to combine passion and contribution. It's also a very clear path to happiness."115 She couldn't be more right. You will not be as successful as you could be if you only like what you do and don't love it. Trite, perhaps, but true. Sheryl is also right in saying that combining passion and contribution is a luxury: not that it's expensive, but just rare. It's something that many people either can't figure out (how many people truly know their passion at the outset of their careers?) or can't afford (you may love whittling garden gnomes, but the world loves engineers and your spouse and children love a regular paycheck).

And the customer has a voice; provide a bad product or lousy service at your peril.

Are there members of your team whom, if they told you they were leaving, you would not fight hard to keep? If there are employees you would let go, then perhaps you should.

At Google, operations are not just an afterthought: they are critical to the company's success, and we want to have just as much effort and creativity in this domain as in new product development.

YouTube's traffic continues to grow very quickly. Video is something that we think is going to be embedded everywhere. And it makes sense, from Google's perspective, to be the operator of the largest site that contains all that video.

Market research can't tell you about solving problems that customers can't conceive are solvable. Giving the customer what he wants is less important than giving him what he doesn't yet know he wants.

It's also true that many companies get comfortable doing what they have always done, with a few incremental changes. This kind of incrementalism leads to irrelevance over time, especially in technology, because change tends to be revolutionary not evolutionary.

And for more egregious offenses, you need to get rid of the knave, quickly. Think

Ultimately, application vendors are driven by volume, and volume is favored by the open approach Google is taking. There are so many manufacturers working so hard to distribute Android phones globally that whether you like [Android 4.0] or not ... you will want to develop for that platform, and perhaps even first.

People assume that computers will do everything that humans do. Not good. People are different from each other and they are all really different from computers.

The computing world is very good at things that we are not. It is very good at memory.

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.

If you are a manager, it's your responsibility to keep the work part lively and full; it's not a key component of your job to ensure that employees consistently have a forty-hour workweek.

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.

The trend has been mobile was winning. It's now won.

In the Internet Century, a product manager's job is to work together with the people who design, engineer, and develop things to make great products.

People are surprised to find out that an awful lot of people think that they're idiots.

Half of Google's revenue comes from selling text-based ads that are placed near search results and are related to the topic of the search. Another half of its revenues come from licensing its search technology to companies like Yahoo.

Success is really about being ready for the good opportunities that come before you. It's not to have a detailed plan of everything that you're going to do. You can't plan innovation or inspiration, but you can be ready for it, and when you see it, you can jump on it.

If you think about the history of the PC industry, the PC industry has essentially been nothing but acquisitions by one company or another. Dell is the outlier. Dell built its own culture. They automated themselves to be the most efficient manufacturer.

Each country makes a different decision on adult pornography, but the good news is that even governments you hate, hate child pornography.

Keep in mind, from the outset, that the best way to avoid having to fire underperformers is not to hire them.