Steven Levy
Business

Google Watch: Rosenberg Speaks

Mike Swift, who does a great job covering Google for the San Jose Mercury News, sat down with departing Senior VP Jonathan Rosenberg for an interview. (I’m pleased that IN THE PLEX found its way into the conversation, about a story involving something Larry’s mom said to Rosenberg.) Swift got Rosenberg to discuss the book […]

Mike Swift, who does a great job covering Google for the San Jose Mercury News, sat down with departing Senior VP Jonathan Rosenberg for an interview. (I’m pleased that IN THE PLEX found its way into the conversation, about a story involving something Larry’s mom said to Rosenberg.)

Swift got Rosenberg to discuss the book he’s writing with Eric Schmidt.

The truth is it’s really my notes of all the management meetings I’ve been in with Eric, Larry and Sergey (Brin, co-founder of Google). So the proper title for that book really is, sort of, Jonathan Rosenberg playing Alexis de Tocqueville in Google internal management meetings. Somewhere, each of those rules is either my rule, Eric’s rule, Larry’s rule, Sergey’s rule or some other leader on the Google management team. Eric and I have been doing some internal seminars where we have been teaching this set of rules to Google employees, mostly managers. We are harvesting narratives and stories from them, so that we can build more narratives and stories into the book. What we would like to do is produce our version of the rules of management that we developed out of working at Google.

And here I thought I did the de Tocqueville thing at Google! Plenty of room for more! I’m especially eager to hear the kind of stuff that goes on at the meetings they wouldn’t let me get near.

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