Eric Schmidt does not have good insight into anything happening on the factory floor at Google post-2013/2014. I'd take anything he says with a huge grain of salt.
I was at Google march 2011- dec 2018 and when I tried reading Schmidt's "How Google works", I had to put it down coz it was obviously so disconnected from the realities.
I think highly of Eric as a leader, and a smart person, but he has no clue about why Google has struggled to innovate from 2014-2015 onward.
Specifically: Eric Schitt used something known as "The Conjoined Triangles of Success" which is a compromise between Sales and Engineering triangles. His principle was the beginning of the end - when I was at google (long after Eric Schitt had left), I would call it "the conjoined cube of sales" because google had become more of a sales and marketing type organization as opposed to its engineering roots. So that's all to say Eric Schitt's assessment of the culture was quote anachronistic versus the real culture, particularly on the engineering-sales axis of the conjoined triangle of success
I was at Google march 2011- dec 2018 and when I tried reading Schmidt's "How Google works", I had to put it down coz it was obviously so disconnected from the realities.
I think highly of Eric as a leader, and a smart person, but he has no clue about why Google has struggled to innovate from 2014-2015 onward.