This the best, quickest way to get fired when you work at Google
Google chairman Eric Schmidt and former svp/product management Jonathan Rosenberg wrote a book about management called "How Google Works." In it, they talk about all the things they learned running the world's biggest and best search engine.
At a talk in London last year, the pair revealed what they looked for when hiring new people at the company.
But sometimes Google needs to get rid of people, too, especially when a staffer isn't a good fit with the company's culture. Rosenberg said the company was constantly on the lookout for "knaves," or employees who are so annoying or ill-willed that they drive away the good employees. Too many knaves can cripple a company, Rosenberg says, so preventing a high "knave density" — the level of antagonistic employees concentrated in any one team — is crucial. "If you get more than a few of these knaves, people don't want to come to work in the morning," he said.
So what does a knave look like?
Knaves "lie, cheat, steal, and take credit for other people's work," Rosenberg said. He also said knaves "leak."
That last bit was interesting, and may help explain why, despite the fact that Google has roughly 48,000 employees, the company's staff members rarely tell the media stories off the record.
Here's the passage from the book that talks about the danger of knave density:
[Transcribed from picture]
Life is something like that island, only more complicated. For not only are knaves in real life devoid of integrity, they are also sloppy, selfish, and have a sneaky way of working their way into virtually any company. Arrogance, for example, is a knavish tendency that is a natural by-product of success, since exceptionalism is fundamental to winning. Nice humble engineers have a way of becoming insufferable when they think they are the sole inventors of the world's next big thing. This is quite dangerous, as ego creates blind spots.
There are other things that classify people as knaves. Jealous of your colleague's success? You're a knave. (Remember that famous knave Iago, warning the smart creative Othello to "beware, my lord, of jealousy. Is is the free-eye'd monster, which doth mock the meat it feeds on.") Taking credit for someone else's work? Knave. Selling a customer something she doesn't need or won't benefit from? Knave. Blowing up a Lean Cuisine in the company microwave and not cleaning it up? Knave. Tagging the wall of a nave? Knave.
