Work Rules! (Laszlo Bock, 2015)

It was more than a little surreal to read a book called Work Rules! at the same time as "Leisure the Basis of Culture" by Josef Pieper. Needless to say, these guys don't roll in the same circles, never mind the fact one died just before the professional life of the other began. It was hard not to see these books as opposed to one another, but with a little discipline I was able to put each one in its place. Nevertheless, the two books have such wildly different assumptions of what constitutes a culture that they are never going to dovetail.

Whereas Pieper fears the culture of "total work", Bock lives it. He isn't writing a book about work/life balance, so it's not as if the message of the book is to "shut up and work", but rather to make your work enjoyable, which is assumed by Bock (and most members of Western culture) to define ourselves and give us meaning. Pieper would disagree here, but I'm going to have to set my favorite German philosopher aside at this point and examine Bock's work directly.

In case it isn't clear from the subtitle, Laszlo Bock is a Google guy. Google fascinates just about everyone, so it is only natural that a book about Google's "people operations" (don't you dare say "human resources", you cro magnon) is going to garner a lot of interest. While the cover and title are radiant and designed to attract from the bookshelf, I discovered the book through a reference from How Google Works, which was citing this book a year before its publication. Each chapter discusses different aspects of working environments, with ample examples of how Google does it. Then you get a set of "rules" at the end of the chapter that summarize the key points. The tone is encouraging, but it can also be overwhelming. For example, I'm just a middle manager type in a very small division of a small operation. I can't do what Google does. To his credit, Bock acknowledges that most readers aren't going to have the same resources, but he scales his suggestions to fit a variety of settings.

Finally, read all the footnotes. Oddly enough, the thing about this book that stuck with me the most was a pancake recipe in the footnotes. I can't resist a good stack of flapjacks, so I intend to try it soon. There are also endnotes, but most of these are just references, so you aren't depriving yourself of the full Google experience if you skip them.