I will let you read Chapter 8 and here are the 8 rules from the study :Ģ- Empower the team and do not micromanage.ģ- Express interest/concern for team members’ success and personal well-being.ĥ- Be a good communicator – listen and share information.Ħ- Help the team with career development.ħ- Have a clear vision/strategy for the team.Ĩ- Have important technical skills that help advise the team. Still Project Oxygen initially set out to prove that managers don’t matter ended up demonstrating that good managers were crucial. Wayne was besieged with requests for expense report approvals and for help in resolving interpersonal conflicts, and within six weeks the managers were reinstated. Instead every engineer in the company reported to Wayne Rosing. We had over three hundred engineers at the time, and anyone who was a manager was relieved of management responsibilities. It was such a deeply held belief that in 2002 Larry and Sergey eliminated all manager roles in the company. That is the point at which … the end learns or justifies the means. Īcton who said “Power corrupts absolute power corrupts absolutely” also wrote: Great mean are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority, there is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. Rather, we are profoundly suspicious of power, and the way managers historically have abused it. It turns out that we are not skeptical about managers per se. But our Project Oxygen research, which we’ll cover in depth in chapter 8, showed the managers in fact do many good things. This is just how engineers think: managers are a Dilbertian layer that at best protects the people doing the actual work from the even more poorly informed people higher up the org chart. Bock develops this further.Īt google, we have always had a deep skepticism about management. Google has been famous for defiance of authority.