SPEAKER 1: Good morning.

Good morning.

Thank you all so much for coming.

Today at Google, we're delighted to welcome Patty McCord.

Patty is one of the world's foremost experts

on company culture.

She was an early employee at Netflix,

and she was a co-author of the famous Netflix culture

deck, which Sheryl Sandberg said was

one of the most important documents

to come out of Silicon Valley.

She's here today to discuss her new book, titled "Powerful:

Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility," which

was largely an effort to sort of boil down

the message of the famous Netflix culture deck.

So please join me in welcoming to Google Miss Patty McCord.

[APPLAUSE]

PATTY MCCORD: So I'm just going to couple--

how many people have seen the Netflix culture deck?

A couple of you.

I didn't write it.

I didn't co-author it with Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix.

Reed and I did another company before Netflix,

a company called Pure Software.

We sold software tools to other software engineers.

And we grew through a merger and acquisition.

And how we grew was we'd acquire a company,

and every time we'd acquire a company, we'd double.

So we were like 100, 200, 400, 6--

right.

And then we sold the company to our largest competitor.

And my job was to take their employee

handbook and our employee handbook

and smash them together and come up

with the fewest policies that would piss off

the fewest people.

And so what we decided to do at Netflix that was different

was pay attention to the kind of company

that we were working at, primarily

for totally selfish reasons.

I didn't want to work with brilliant assholes anymore.

And I wanted to have permission to say no.

And Reed wasn't very tolerant of people who weren't very smart

or weren't very into the company.

So what we decided to do differently,

for those of you that have read the Netflix culture deck,

is just write stuff down.

So my journey was not only to write down what kind of company

that we wanted to work at, my job was

to be the COO of that culture, which meant if we said this,

then did we do this?

And that's the part where most companies get it wrong.

And I want you to go away from my talk

today and think about what you're doing here

and what you're saying you are as Google

and who you really are acting as Google,

because that's what company culture really is.

So since I've been away, I get to talk to people

who are outside of business and who

are people who are kind of on the speaker circuit.

So I end up onstage with a lot of coaches,

like real sports coaches from real professional sports teams.

So I was in Montreal last year in February.

Has anybody been to Montreal in February?

So cold.

It is so cold.

So I called up my daughter, and I said, hey, by the way,

I'm doing this talk in Montreal in February.

She's like, Mom, go to Patagonia.

Go now.

Get a puffy coat.

Get the big one.

So then I realized how dang cold it is in Montreal in February.

So I figure out my hotel so that I

can go underground so that I can go up to the venue, which is

a place called the Bell Centre.

Does anybody know what happens at the Bell Centre in Montreal?

No hockey fans, huh?

OK.

Well, that's where the Stanley Cup is played.

Now, at this point I've been talking

to groups who are a little bigger than you, but not much.

Like as if this room was full is kind of my biggest audience.

So I go down below.

And at the last minute, they said to me, oh, by the way,

you're not going to be onstage alone.

You're going to be with this guy named Scotty Bowman.

So I google Scotty Bowman, and he's a hockey coach.

He's the winningest hockey coach in history

in the National Hockey League.

So I meet him underground.

We're underground at this venue.

And he's this older gentleman.

He's like 70, and he has on a little suit with a maple leaf

pin and an American flag.

And we're talking about his grandkids.

And he says to me, we're under the ice.

And then it occurs to me, we're in a hockey stadium.

Like a hockey stadium.

So it's not you guys.

It's not this little intimate room.

I go up onstage, and my face is on the Jumbotron.

I mean, it's like huhhh!

And it's really scary.

And there's thousands of people in the audience.

And so he introduces me, nice introduction.

The audience claps very politely,

and I go sit on my little velvet couch.

And Scott Bowman comes up, and the place goes crazy.

I'm in Montreal in a hockey stadium

with the winningest hockey coach in history.

They're clapping like this.

[LAUGHTER]

If they had had those foam fingers,

they'd be doing the foam fingers.

I mean, people are like, taking selfies.

Because I'm onstage with God, as far as

they're concerned in Montreal.

So he comes up.

He sits down.

The master of ceremonies, who has a diamond

earring and teleprompter, and he's working the audience.

And he says, Mr. Bowman, you're such a legend.

You've won so many tournaments.

You've played with all the great players.

What does it take to be a winning team?

How do you give people feedback?

And he says, well, we have an 80-game season.

And every 10 games, I sit down with each player,

and I do an assessment of how they're doing.

They do a self-assessment.

We pull all the stats.

We get feedback from the other coaches.

We get feedback from the other players.

We talk about who we're going to play in the next 10 games, what

the competition is, where their strengths and weaknesses are.

And we put together a plan that we're

going to execute for the next 10 games

so that that person can be an incredibly high performer.

So the guy says to me, Patty McCord,

you've been known for saying how much you hate

the annual performance review.

And I do.

I think it's an utter, total waste of time for most

companies that do it that way.

And so he said, if you didn't do that, what would

you do instead?

And I said, what he said.

Because the thing is that sports coaches

know how to put together teams that win.

And that's really all that management really

is, as far as I'm concerned.

For 30 years, I've been watching people put together teams.

And it's all about doing that.

And the reason I also put the slide up that says team

is that-- and I know you probably

don't say this much here, but in case you

do-- you're not a family.

Right?

Work isn't your family.

It's not undying love.

You're not going to loan your deadbeat brother-in-law money,

and he'll never pay you back, because you always do.

Because this is work.

And you come together to do something

that you can only do here.

And that's create terrific products

that make people happy.

And that joy, I think, of working

is what really makes people happy.

And I say that here at Google, where you

have God's gift to everything.

And I know that when you go home and you say, oh my God, it

was an amazing day at work, almost always

when you say that truthfully from your soul,

it's because you did something hard

with really smart people that made you really effective.

And that's my observations of teams over all those years.

And in order to make it work, it's

about putting together the right teams.

So because I started as a recruiter,

I think a lot about talent.

And what I want to talk to you about

is you today, because I think I don't

need to lecture you guys about how great organizations should

move fluidly and be more flexible

and be more accepting of change, because that's

the world that you live in.

But I want to talk to you about how you navigate

through your own career.

So I just did a talk with 1,500 HR people.

I know that's a frightening idea for most of you.

It's even a frightening idea for me.

Like when I first started talking to HR people

before I wrote the book, people walked out

because I said things that really upset them.

But what I said was to 1,500 HR people,

please raise your hand if you're in the job

that you had when you graduated from college.

How many people raised their hand?

None.

How many of you have ever done a layoff?

1,500 people raised their hands.

How many of you have ever laid off a family member?

There's always one.

Don't ask me why, but people do that.

Like somebody did.

And then I say, how many of you have said the word family

at work?

And 900 people raised their hands.

And I say, for all of you that aren't in the same job,

you mean none of you could work for a company that

could handle retention?

So the truth is that our lives, our careers,

are full of lots of different jobs

in lots of different organizations.

And what I love about Google these days

is that you've now admitted that there's

lots of different organizations in the corporation that

is Google, all the alphabet companies.

So if you start thinking about your career

and how you're going to be successful

and how you're going to move forward,

here's my hint from doing this for a very, very long time.

Is what you love to do that you are extraordinarily

good at doing something the company you work for needs

someone to be great at?

So if you wake up in the morning and you

don't want to come to work, or you're not looking forward

to it and it seems really horrible,

then something's wrong with Patty's algorithm.

And I say algorithm because I worked with geeks all my life,

and I love you and I miss you.

But if I say words like algorithm, it helps, right?

OK.

So what you love to do that you're

extraordinarily good at doing--

is it important?

So when you find yourself coming to work and thinking,

they just don't care about how good I am at writing.

They don't even realize how wonderful

I am, how talented I am.

They may realize it and not care.

That's the honest truth.

And the other part is if you need somebody

to be really, really good and really, really

passionate about a problem you're trying to solve,

and they can just do it, but they don't love it,