Eric Schmidt > Quotes

“The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.”
― Eric Schmidt

“A mind set in its ways is wasted. Don't do it.”
― 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

“Innovative people do not need to be told to do it, they need to be allowed to do it.”
― Eric Schmidt, How Google Works

“If you focus on your competition, you will never deliver anything truly innovative.”
― Eric Schmidt, How Google Works

“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, How Google Works

“Google dress code was: "You must wear something".”
― Eric Schmidt, How Google Works

“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.”
― Eric Schmidt, How Google Works

“Make sure you would work for yourself.”
― Eric Schmidt, How Google Works

“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, How Google Works

“To innovate, you must learn to fail well. Learn from your mistakes:”
― Eric Schmidt, How Google Works

“You need to have confidence in your people, and enough self-confidence to let them identify a better way.”
― Eric Schmidt, How Google Works

“I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.”
― Eric Schmidt, How Google Works

“Bill looked for four characteristics in people. The person has to be smart, not necessarily academically but more from the standpoint of being able to get up to speed quickly in different areas and then make connections. Bill called this the ability to make “far analogies.” The person has to work hard, and has to have high integrity. Finally, the person should have that hard-to-define characteristic: grit. The ability to get knocked down and have the passion and perseverance to get up and go at it again.”
― Eric Schmidt, Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell

“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, How Google Works

“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, How Google Works

“ONLY COACH THE COACHABLE THE TRAITS THAT MAKE A PERSON COACHABLE INCLUDE HONESTY AND HUMILITY, THE WILLINGNESS TO PERSEVERE AND WORK HARD, AND A CONSTANT OPENNESS TO LEARNING.”
― Eric Schmidt, Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell

“It helps to see failure as a road and not a wall.”
― Eric Schmidt, How Google Works

“If you want something done, give it to a busy person.”
― Eric Schmidt, How Google Works

“ego creates blind spots.”
― Eric Schmidt, How Google Works

“The human race built most nobly when limitations were greatest.”
― Eric Schmidt, How Google Works

“This is the power of coaching in general: the ability to offer a different perspective, one unaffected by being “in the game.”
― Eric Schmidt, Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell

“He believed in striving for the best idea, not consensus (“I hate consensus!” he would growl), intuitively understanding what numerous academic studies have shown: that the goal of consensus leads to “groupthink” and inferior decisions.”
― Eric Schmidt, Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Handbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell

“Bill liked to tell a story about when he was at Intuit and they started getting into banking products. They hired some product managers with banking experience. One day, Bill was at a meeting with one of those product managers, who presented his engineers with a list of features he wanted them to build. Bill told the poor product manager, if you ever tell an engineer at Intuit which features you want, I’m going to throw you out on the street. You tell them what problem the consumer has. You give them context on who the consumer is. Then let them figure out the features. They will provide you with a far better solution than you’ll ever get by telling them what to build.”
― Eric Schmidt, Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell

“Work-life balance. This is another touchstone of supposedly “enlightened” management practices that can be insulting to smart, dedicated employees. The phrase itself is part of the problem: For many people, work is an important part of life, not something to be separated. The best cultures invite and enable people to be overworked in a good way, with too many interesting things to do both at work and at home.”
― Eric Schmidt, How Google Works

“Not what happened and who’s to blame, but what are we going to do about it?”
― Eric Schmidt, Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell

“Voltaire wrote, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.”188 Steve Jobs told the Macintosh team that “real artists ship.”189 New ideas are never perfect right out of the chute, and you don’t have time to wait until they get there. Create a product, ship it, see how it does, design and implement improvements, and push it back out. Ship and iterate. The companies that are the fastest at this process will win.”
― Eric Schmidt, How Google Works

“When you listen to people, they feel valued. A 2003 study from Lund University in Sweden finds that “mundane, almost trivial” things like listening and chatting with employees are important aspects of successful leadership, because “people feel more respected, visible and less anonymous, and included in teamwork.”10 And a 2016 paper finds that this form of “respectful inquiry,” where the leader asks open questions and listens attentively to the response, is effective because it heightens the “follower’s” feelings of competence (feeling challenged and experiencing mastery), relatedness (feeling of belonging), and autonomy (feeling in control and having options). Those three factors are sort of the holy trinity of the self-determination theory of human motivation, originally developed by Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan.11”
― Eric Schmidt, Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell

“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, How Google Works

“The business should always be outrunning the processes, so chaos is right where you want to be.”
― Eric Schmidt, How Google Works