Google's Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg share "How Google Works" with Cleveland Clinic's Dr. Toby Cosgrove (gallery)

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- In an age where "Just Google it" means "Go look it up," it's easy to forget that Google Inc. as a company is only 16 years old. Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt and former Google executive Jonathan Rosenberg believe the company owes much of its growth and influence to its deliberately unconventional culture, as captured in their just-released book, "How Google Works."

Schmidt and Rosenberg joined Dr. Toby Cosgrove, chief executive of The Cleveland Clinic, for a fireside chat-style conversation on Wednesday night, sharing stories about hiring "smart creatives," banning "knaves," avoiding evil, and fostering a culture of innovation. More than 500 Clinic employees and others attended the talk.

"We make decisions based on the user. If you're not in that territory, you're going to be called out," Schmidt said. "It's made the end users happy. That's better than 'We did it for earnings' or 'We did it for shareholders.'"

"Part of Google's mission is making the world a better place," he said. "That's the only way you're going to increase shareholder value."

Cleveland Clinic CEO Toby Cosgrove said Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg made Google "the single essential tool of modern life."

Cosgrove introduced them with these words: "As top executives at Google, they led an era of unprecedented creativity and growth. In different ways, they revolutionized the life of the mind, and made Google the single essential tool of modern life."

When Sergey Brin and Larry Page founded Google in 1998, they focused primarily on the user, creating products and services that she would find indispensable, and telling themselves they would figure out the money part of the equation later. While other companies operate according to hierarchies and protocols, Google encourages employees to take risks, challenge assumptions and try new things.

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The best way to keep coming up with great ideas is to hire the most brilliant engineers you can and give them the freedom to do their jobs, they said.

They call their most coveted employees "smart creatives," explaining in their book that "if she were into needlepoint, she would sew a pillow that said, '... If I give you an idea, then you will have a new idea but I'll have it, too.' Then she would figure out a way to make the pillow fly around the room and shoot lasers."

Schmidt, who served as Google's CEO from 2001 to 2011, and Rosenberg, its former senior vice president of products, realized from their first day at Google that it was unlike anyplace else either had ever worked.

As they put it in their book, "we humbly acknowledge our great luck in having joined a spectacular company, run by brilliant founders, at the unique moment in history when the Internet was taking off. We weren't quite born on third base thinking we had hit a triple, but first or second sounds about right."

Some highlights of their conversation with Toby Cosgrove:

Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt tells Cleveland Clinic CEO Dr. Toby Cosgrove about Google's "Don't be evil" company culture.

"Don't be evil":

Their 2004 initial public offering letter included the unusual motto "Don't be evil." Schmidt said the phrase sets a high standard and acts as an internal control to make sure that they believe in what they're doing.

He recalled one meeting where the company was considering a new and potentially lucrative way of mixing ads and news, when one engineer pounded on the table and said, "We can't do that, it would be evil." The room got quiet, and the proposed advertising change was reconsidered and rejected.

Although Google has been criticized for it, the company is well known for being open and transparent in its communications. "Most companies are not nearly as open with emails, intranet and sharing information with employees," Rosenberg said.

Pointing to Schmidt, Rosenberg said: "Every time he presents to the board, a few weeks later, he presents the exact same slides to the employees -- all the employees."

Most other companies operate with silos of information, where information flows down only to the people who need it. Google believes "these are honest people trying to do a good job," he said. "You have really smart people. Give them goals. Communicate with them."

Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, and Jonathan Rosenberg, an advisor to Google CEO Larry Page, told Dr. Toby Cosgrove that Google Inc. is unlike anywhere else either has ever worked.

On meetings:

Rosenberg said the things most people like about the book are its rules for running better meetings and writing better emails.

Among their rules: Not everyone needs to be at every meeting. "People create standing meetings, and expect everybody to go all the time," which is a colossal waste of time, Rosenberg said. "Fewer people is almost always better" for more efficient meetings.

If people attend meetings, they should focus on what's happening, not be checking their phones or laptops, Schmidt said. He tried to make people turn off their phones at his meetings, but found them hunched over in prayer position, surreptitiously checking their phones under the table. "You can't, at Google, get people to go offline during a meeting."

Schmidt said that when there's an ongoing or critical issue, he holds a weekly meeting. If that doesn't work, he holds daily meetings, perhaps even hourly meetings, until it's resolved.

"Sometimes if you get the right people in the room and have it out, you get exceptional ideas," Schmidt said.

On hiring:

Google, a $50 billion company with more than 50,000 employees around the world, is legendary for its unconventional hiring process. For every opening, Google receives at least 1,000 applications. "The good news is that we have computers to do the initial vetting," Schmidt said. "You can figure out if someone's going to be a good fit in five interviews."

Google looks for people with technology capacity, business acumen and curiosity. "You can't teach passion, but you can teach just about everything else," Rosenberg said.  "Without passion and curiosity, they're not going to have the passion to attack big challenges."

Schmidt said he uses "the LAX test" (picking that airport for maximum discomfort, he explains): "You're stuck at the LAX airport" with the candidate. "After six hours, are you still interested in talking to them? Passion or not, that's a very tough test."

Jonathan Rosenberg, an advisor to Google CEO Larry Page, tells Cleveland Clinic Dr. Toby Cosgrove about interviewing with Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

When Rosenberg interviewed at Google, co-founder Sergey Brin asked him to "explain to me something complicated that I don't know."

Rosenberg launched into an explanation of very elaborate economic formulas, only to have Sergey scoff: "This is elementary calculus," something he was already an expert in.

So Rosenberg tried again, launching into a discussion of courtship: "Chapter 1: Dangling the hook:" Before he met his wife, someone had told him about her, so he got her address and sent her flowers and a puzzle. Brin was intrigued and impressed, and Rosenberg, "despite his economics and MBA degrees," got the offer.

"Fight for the divas":

Cosgrove asked them to elaborate on the idea: "exile the knaves, but fight for the divas."

Rosenberg said maintaining Google's collaborative culture requires weeding out and getting rid of the knaves: Employees who lack integrity, who are jealous of their peers, take credit for others' work, and think only of themselves. "Nice humble engineers have a way of becoming insufferable when they think they are the sole inventors of the world's next big thing," they write in their book. "This is quite dangerous, as ego creates blind spots... Nip crazy in the bud."

Divas, on the other hand, display "high exceptionalism," Rosenberg said. If the divas are brilliant and doing a good job, they should be valued and allowed to do their jobs. "As long as ... the divas' achievements outweigh the collateral damage caused by their diva ways, you should fight for them."

"They will pay off your investment by doing interesting things," they write. "...Remember that Steve Jobs was one of the greatest business divas the world has ever known!"

A full house listens to Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, an advisor to Google CEO Larry Page, and Cleveland Clinic CEO Dr. Toby Cosgrove during Wednesday's discussion about "Ideas for Tomorrow."

What's next?

When one audience member asked how companies can attract more Millennials, Schmidt said: "Tell the young people you're going to listen to them, and then run the company that way."

He said he was in a sales meeting with executives of Best Buy when a question came from a young woman sitting at the end of the table. "The smartest person in the room was this 25-year-old woman, and we were about to ignore her," he said. "Thank God we let her talk."

When another person asked Schmidt to name the three people he would most like to clone, he answered: "There's a new generation of 20-somethings who are far smarter, better educated and have better values than my generation."

Schmidt cited things like Google's "20-percent time" policy, which lets Google engineers spend 20 percent of their time working on whatever project they want. "Googlers" have used that time to develop Google Now, Google News, Google transit maps, and even Google Suggest, which tries to finish your phrase or sentence when you try to search for something on Google.

When Cosgrove asked the authors what's coming next, Rosenberg said that 2.5 billion people in the developing world are soon going to get smart phones, and that it will be as eye-opening and transformative for them as it was for us.

Schmidt said medicine will expand its noninvasive technological capabilities, to a point where a transdermal patch might pick up on symptoms before the person does, such as early signs of Alzheimer's, or a troubled heartbeat.

"Your phone will call you and say, 'You're going to die, and you need to go to the hospital,'" Schmidt said. "Then it will call the hospital and say, 'He's coming in 10 minutes, because I just scared the crap out of him.'"

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