The Innovation Diaries

Minnie and I are at the Great Place to Work Conference in St Louis this week and attended the opening Key Note session today. The speakers were Laszlo Bock, VP for People Operations at Google and Jack DePeters, SVP of Store Ops at Wegmans. Both have won the Best Place to Work in the USA.
Just thought I’d share a few things that stuck with me.

Laszo said there were three things that make Google unique …

1) Self awareness. By this he meant just going ahead and trying things out, even if you have two competing ideas, try them both out and see what sticks -prove what you say - back everything up with data.
2) Screen for culture fit - they have 7000 applications a day, and during the hiring process, no one person can black ball a candidate. All interviewers make notes that are then reviewed by a hiring committee - he looks for people ho love ambiguity and vagueness and are OK with “gently self policing”.
3) Making work a better place
It’s OK to have fun at work. In fact it’s more than OK. It’s essential. Wegmans said that to be successful an organisation has to answer four questions - “who we are”, “what we believe”, “what we do” and “what we measure”. They exist to “help people live healthier and better lives” and he told us about an iconic action they recently undertook. Listen to this….they are a retailer and they chose to stop selling cigarettes! They say they genuinely care for their employees (6000 of who are under 18 years old) and the health of their customers, and by not selling cigarettes they were being true to what they believe in.