Talks at Google Talks at Google

Professors Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao visit Google to discuss their book “The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder.” This book is a useful guide to eliminating the forces that make it harder, more complicated, or downright impossible to get things done in organizations.
Every organization is plagued by destructive friction. Yet some forms of friction are incredibly useful, and leaders who attempt to improve workplace efficiency often make things even worse. Drawing from seven years of hands-on research, Sutton and Rao teach readers how to become “friction fixers.”
Sutton and Rao unpack how skilled friction fixers think and act like trustees of each others’ time. They provide friction forensics to help readers identify where to avert and repair bad organizational friction and where to maintain and inject good friction. The heart of the book digs into the causes and solutions for five of the most common and damaging friction troubles: oblivious leaders, addition sickness, broken connections, jargon monoxide, and fast & frenzied people and teams.
Sound familiar? Sutton and Rao are here to help. They wrap things up with lessons for leading your own friction project, including linking little things to big things; the power of civility, caring, and love for propelling designs and repairs; and embracing the mess that is an inevitable part of the process.
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Sara Mednick visits Google to discuss her book, "Take a Nap! Change Your Life."
Imagine a product that increases alertness, boosts creativity, reduces stress, improves perception, stamina, motor skills, and accuracy, helps you make better decisions, keeps you looking younger, aids in weight loss, reduces the risk of heart attack, elevates your mood, and strengthens memory. Now imagine that this product is nontoxic, has no dangerous side effects, and, best of all, is absolutely free.
This miracle drug is, in fact, nothing more than the nap: the right nap at the right time. Sara Mednik’s book Take a Nap! details a scientifically-based breakthrough program that shows how we can fight the fatigue epidemic through a custom-designed nap. The book explains the five stages of the sleep cycle, particularly Stage Two, or Slow Wave Sleep, and REM, and the benefits each one provides; how to assess your tiredness and set up a personal sleep profile; and how to neutralize the voice in your head that tells you napping is a sign of laziness.
Using the unique Nap Wheel on the cover and interior graphs and charts, it shows us exactly when our optimal napping time is, and exactly how long we should try to sleep—even how it’s possible to design a nap to inspire creativity one day, and the next day design one to help us with our memory. There are tips on how to create the right nap environment, a 16-step technique for falling asleep, a six-week napping workbook, and more.
Originally published in November of 2007.
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Neuroscience specialist Stefanie Faye visits Google to discuss neurophysiology and its connection to mental health, drawing from her book Biomechanics of Human Communication: Neurophysiology, Regulation, and Systems Thinking.
Stefanie Faye is a neuroscience specialist with expertise in optimizing learning, performance, attentional control, cognitive flexibility, and emotional regulation using biofeedback, neurotechnology, cognitive training and frameworks that integrate childhood experiences and family systems. Her graduate degree from New York University focused on neuroplasticity, empathy and emotion regulation. She has worked as a counselor, cognitive trainer, reading therapist, research analyst, coordinator of learning programs, and has analyzed many physiological aspects of nervous system states and brain functioning including electric conductance of the skin, facial electromyography, heart rate variability and quantitative electro-encephalography. She integrates all of this with her experience training in monasteries with meditation masters from Vietnam, India and West Africa.
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Major General Tammy Smith discusses her background as a member of the LGBTQ+ community in the US military, her experience as the highest ranking and first out-and-proud Major General, and what her leadership means to the LGBTQ+ community at large. 
Tammy Smith is a recently retired Army Major General. At the conclusion of her 35 year career, she was serving at the Pentagon as the Military Advisor to the Assistant Secretary of the Army, the US military’s largest service branch with over one million personnel in the Active, National Guard and Reserve force. Upon her promotion to Brigadier General in 2012, mere months after the repeal of Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell, Smith gained unexpected visibility as the US military’s first openly LGBTQ+ General Flag officer. Rather than downplaying the significance of this unanticipated status, Tammy leveraged her role by promoting inclusion and diversity in the Army and Department of Defense, contributing to a culture of acceptance and trust in a post-Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell military.
Originally published in July of 2021.
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Professor of psychology and neuroscience Charan Ranganath visits Google to discuss his book "Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory's Power to Hold on to What Matters." The book reveals the powerful role memory plays in nearly every aspect of our lives, from recalling faces and names, to learning, decision-making, trauma, and healing.
A new understanding of memory is emerging from the latest scientific research. Memory is not quite the repository of the past that we can tap into as we wish. It is actually a highly transformative power, active at all times, that shapes our present in often secretive and sometimes destructive ways.
We are in many ways creatures of memory and only when we understand the mechanisms of memory can we truly understand ourselves and our motivations, and use our knowledge of those mechanisms to our advantage while avoiding their pitfalls. Why We Remember teaches the principles behind memory storage and retrieval, and explains how our memories are always changing. It reveals how these processes affect what we think we know about ourselves and how we make decisions.
Memory is designed to be selective, meaningful, and malleable. When we understand how memory works, we can cut through the clutter and remember the things we want to remember. We can not only remember more—we can remember better.
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Mary Roach visits Google to discuss her book "Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law."
What’s to be done about a jaywalking moose? A bear caught breaking and entering? A murderous tree? Three hundred years ago, animals that broke the law would be assigned legal representation and put on trial. These days, the answers are best found not in jurisprudence but in science: the curious science of human-wildlife conflict, a discipline at the crossroads of human behavior and wildlife biology. 
Mary Roach is the author of six New York Times bestsellers, including "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers"; "Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal", and "Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void." Her books have been published in 21 languages, and her second book, "Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife", was a New York Times Notable Book. Mary has written for National Geographic, Wired, The New York Times Magazine, and the Journal of Clinical Anatomy, among others. 
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