Eric Schmidt Quotes

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. ~ Eric Schmidt

Bet on technical insights that help solve a big problem in a novel way, optimize for scale, not for revenue, and let great products grow the market for everyone. ~ Eric Schmidt

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

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. ~ Eric Schmidt

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

I believe that this notion of self-publishing, which is what Blogger and blogging are really about, is the next big wave of human communication. The last big wave was Web activity. Before that one it was e-mail. Instant messaging was an extension of e-mail, real-time e-mail. ~ Eric Schmidt

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. ~ Eric Schmidt

Android is ahead of the iPhone now, ~ Eric Schmidt

In a world of asynchronous threats, it is too dangerous for there not to be some way to identify you. We need a [verified] name service for people. Governments will demand it. ~ Eric Schmidt

I leave out the parts that people skip. ~ Eric Schmidt

Your default mode should be to share everything ~ Eric Schmidt

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). ~ Eric Schmidt

I've come to a view that humans will continue to do what we do well, and that computers will continue to do what they do very well, and the two will coexist, but in different spaces. ~ Eric Schmidt

The issues of wireless versus wireline gets very messy. And that's really an FCC issue, not a Google issue. ~ Eric Schmidt

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. ~ Eric Schmidt

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

dissent must be an obligation, not an option. ~ Eric Schmidt

There's been spying for years, there's been surveillance for years, and so forth, I'm not going to pass judgement on that, it's the nature of our society. ~ Eric Schmidt

You should hire the best engineer you can find, regardless of her coding preference, because if she's the best she can down enough Java to C how to make the Python Go. ~ Eric Schmidt

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. ~ Eric Schmidt

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. ~ Eric Schmidt

The most valuable result of 20 percent time isn't the products and features that get created, it's the things that people learn when they try something new. ~ Eric Schmidt

Just remember when you post something, the computers remember forever ~ Eric Schmidt

Favoring specialization over intelligence is exactly wrong, especially in high tech. The world is changing so fast across every industry and endeavor that it's a given the role for which you're hiring is going to change. Yesterday's widget will be obsolete tomorrow, and hiring a specialist in such a dynamic environment can backfire. A specialist brings an inherent bias to solving problems that spawns from the very expertise that is his putative advantage, and may be threatened by a new type of solution that requires new expertise. A smart generalist doesn't have bias, so is free to survey the wide range of solutions and gravitate to the best one. ~ Eric Schmidt

The biggest mistake that I made was not anticipating the rise of the social networking phenomenon, ~ Eric Schmidt

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. ~ Eric Schmidt

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. ~ Eric Schmidt

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. ~ Eric Schmidt

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. ~ Eric Schmidt

Google Maps are phenomenal. Yep, ask an Apple user. ~ Eric Schmidt

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. ~ Eric Schmidt

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. ~ Eric Schmidt

When the Internet publicity began, I remember being struck by how much the world was not the way we thought it was, that there was infinite variation in how people viewed the world. ~ Eric Schmidt

information systems will streamline many of them for people living in those countries, such as integrated clothing machines (washing, drying, folding, pressing and sorting) that keep an inventory of clean clothes and algorithmically suggest outfits based on the user's daily schedule. Haircuts will finally be automated and machine-precise. ~ Eric Schmidt

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

Google's a strange place. When I met Eric Schmidt, he said, "If you are kind to everybody, then you will make good decisions because people will give you good information, and if you are truthful to everybody, they will be truthful to you." That's what's different about Google. They screw up and make mistakes, but they genuinely mean the good stuff about "don't be evil." ~ Larry Brilliant

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

Stop being an idiot; all that matters is growth. ~ Eric Schmidt

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. ~ Eric Schmidt

We run the company by questions, not by answers. ~ Eric Schmidt

Hiring decisions are too important to be left in the hands of a manager who may or may not have a stake in the employee's success a year later. ~ Eric Schmidt

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. ~ Eric Schmidt

As Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spake Zarathustra: "You must be proud of your enemy; then your enemy's successes are also your successes."87 Be proud of your competitors. Just don't follow them. ~ Eric Schmidt

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. ~ Eric Schmidt

Revenue solves all known problems.") ~ Eric Schmidt

The self driving car is not self-aware. It's just driving; it's not thinking. ~ Eric Schmidt

I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time. ~ Eric Schmidt

As Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, says: "In the old world, you devoted 30 percent of your time to building a great service and 70 percent of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts."16 ~ Eric Schmidt

We have an opportunity for everyone in the world to have access to all the world's information. This has never before been possible. Why is ubiquitous information so profound? It's a tremendous equalizer. Information is power. ~ Eric Schmidt

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. ~ Eric Schmidt

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

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

Scaling needs to be a core part of your foundation. Competition is much more intense and competitive advantages don't last long, so you have to have a "grow big fast" strategy. ~ Eric Schmidt

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. ~ Eric Schmidt

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. ~ Eric Schmidt

To me Amazon is a story of a brilliant founder who personally drove the vision," says Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google and an avowed Amazon competitor who is personally a member of Amazon Prime, its two-day shipping service. "There are almost no better examples. Perhaps Apple, but people forget that most people believed Amazon was doomed because it would not scale at a cost structure that would work. ~ Brad Stone

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. ~ Eric Schmidt

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

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. ~ Eric Schmidt

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. ~ Eric Schmidt

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. ~ Eric Schmidt

This is why a venture capitalist will always follow the maxim of investing in the team, not the plan. Since the plan is wrong, the people have to be right. Successful teams spot the flaws in their plan and adjust. So ~ Eric Schmidt

Creating a meritocracy requires equal participation by both the hippo, who could rule the day by fiat, and the brave smart creative, who risks getting trampled as she stands up for quality and merit. ~ Eric Schmidt

There are an untold number of cultural similarities that have never been fully explored because of the difficulty of communication; in a future revolutionary setting, seemingly random connections between distant populations or people will entail knowledge transfer, outsourcing certain types of duties and amplifying the movement's message in a new and unexpected way. ~ Eric Schmidt

The "first follower" principle: When creating a movement, attracting the first follower is the most crucial step. ~ Eric Schmidt

consensus is not about getting everyone to agree. Instead, it's about coming to the best idea for the company and rallying around it. ~ Eric Schmidt

Eric Schmidt likes to point out that if you recorded all human communication from the dawn of time to 2003, it takes up about five billion gigabytes of storage space. Now were creating that much data every two days ~ Eli Pariser

(A frequent Eric aphorism during financial discussions: "Revenue solves all known problems.") ~ Eric Schmidt

Find a way to say yes to things. Say yes to invitations to a new country, say yes to meet new friends, say yes to learn something new. Yes is how you get your first job, and your next job, and your spouse, and even your kids. Even if it's a bit edgy, a bit out of your comfort zone, saying yes means that you will do something new, meet someone new, and make a difference. Yes lets you stand out in a crowd, be the optimist, see the glass full, be the one everyone comes to. Yes is what keeps us all young. ~ Eric Schmidt

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. ~ Eric Schmidt

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. ~ Eric Schmidt

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. ~ Eric Schmidt

Smart creatives thrive on interacting with each other. The mixture you get when you cram them together is combustible, so a top priority must be to keep them crowded. ~ Eric Schmidt

A technical insight is a new way of applying technology or design that either drives down the cost or increases the functions and usability of the product by a significant factor. ~ Eric Schmidt

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

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. ~ Eric Schmidt

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. ~ Eric Schmidt

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. ~ Eric Schmidt

We're about to see an acceleration in technological platforms that, for marketers, will be on a scale rivalled only by the arrival of color TV. ~ Eric Schmidt

Leadership requires passion. ~ Eric Schmidt

John Seely Brown, the former director of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, once said, The essence of being human involves asking questions, not answering them. ~ Eric Schmidt

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. ~ Eric Schmidt

Eric Schmidt looks innocent enough, with his watercolor blue eyes and his tiny office full of toys and his Google campus stocked with volleyball courts and unlocked bikes and wheat-grass shots and cereal dispensers and Haribo Gummi Bears and heated toilet seats and herb gardens and parking lots with cords hanging to plug in electric cars. ~ Maureen Dowd

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. ~ Eric Schmidt

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

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. ~ Eric Schmidt

One of Eric's most basic rules is sort of a golden rule for management: Make sure you would work for yourself. If you are so bad as a manager that you as a worker would hate working for you, then you have some work to do. The best tool we have found for this is the self-review: At least once per year, write a review of your own performance, then read it and see if you would work for you. And then, share it with the people who do in fact work for you. This will elicit greater insights than the standard 360-degree review process, because when you are initiating criticism of yourself it gives others the freedom to be more honest. ~ Eric Schmidt

Over time I've learned, surprisingly, that it's tremendously hard to get teams to be super ambitious. It turns out most people haven't been educated in this kind of moonshot thinking. They tend to assume that things are impossible, rather than starting from real-world physics and figuring out what's actually possible. It's why we've put so much energy into hiring independent thinkers at Google, and setting big goals. Because if you hire the right people and have big enough dreams, you'll usually get there. And even if you fail, you'll probably learn something important. 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. So you need to force yourself to place big bets on the future. ~ Eric Schmidt

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. ~ Eric Schmidt

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

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

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

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. ~ Eric Schmidt

A New Campus: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Ann Bowers. Steve Jobs, appearance before the Cupertino City Council, June 7, 2011. CHAPTER 41: ROUND THREE Family Ties: Interviews with Laurene Powell, Erin Jobs, Steve Jobs, Kathryn Smith, Jennifer Egan. Email from Steve Jobs, June 8, 2010, 4:55 p.m.; Tina Redse to Steve Jobs, July 20, 2010, and Feb. 6, 2011. President Obama: Interviews with David Axelrod, Steve Jobs, John Doerr, Laurene Powell, Valerie Jarrett, Eric Schmidt, Austan Goolsbee. Third Medical Leave, 2011: Interviews with Kathryn Smith, Steve Jobs, Larry Brilliant. Visitors: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mike Slade. CHAPTER 42: LEGACY Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet - And How to Stop It (Yale, 2008), 2; Cory Doctorow, Why I Won't Buy an iPad, ~ Walter Isaacson

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. ~ Eric Schmidt

Tom Lehrer line - "Life is like a sewer: What you get out of it depends on what you put into it"112 - and a promise that if they put real effort into the exercises, he will help them. ~ Eric Schmidt

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

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. ~ Eric Schmidt

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

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. ~ Eric Schmidt