Jonathan Rosenberg, hired after a two-year interview at Google, pushed the idea that there's no such thing as over-communication. He built MoMA, an internal intranet that documented everything from projects to trips, creating radical transparency that built trust between leadership and employees even after the IPO.
When I arrived at Google, my first boss was Jonathan Rosenberg. And if you have time some Sunday afternoon when you don't know what to do, Google Jonathan Rosenberg and look at the YouTube videos that you see about him giving speeches. He was the vice president of the president of product. I think he just left recently, but he was there forever. It took Larry and Sergey 2 years to actually hire him. They interviewed him literally over a 2-year period trying to hire him. Eventually they did hire him. And he would always say there is no such thing as overcommunication. The first day I arrived at Google, I went to him and said, what should I do? And he said, go read the intranet. Google had an intranet called MoMA. No one really knows why it was called MoMA, but it was called MoMA after the Museum of Modern Art. Why? No one knows. And everything was on there. Everything. Everything that you wanted to know about Google, everything that you wanted to know about anything that was going on with Google, any trip anyone has ever taken, there was a trip report on MoMA. So you would find every single possible information you would want on the company. It was radical transparency. And Google really had that until very late, until way past the IPO that most employees had access to a lot of information. Some of the financials were hidden as the company was going public. I'm sure the lawyers told them they can't do that anymore. But one thing that happens is when you over-communicate and when you put all the information out there and you make all your decisions on data is that people start to trust you a lot. If you put trust in your employees that you know, you will give them all the data, you will share all the information. They usually don't abuse that trust. The question I often get at this point is, you know, how can a company share everything? How can a company be completely transparent? And the answer is if you are, you'd be surprised how much of that is actually given back to you and people are not breaching your trust with communication.
