to becoming speaker of the house. john dickerson joining me from cbs and mike allen of politico. >> this won't be the best day for hillary clinton, but she had rst, would there be a new revelation that said she was at fault or did something wrong. or would there be a movement moment where she would be callous or disassembling or dishonest. that didn't happen either. this is the last week of october

which should be a tough month for her. she was able to get through that and it was a long, long day. >> rose: we continue with john grisham who writes so many legal thrillers. his next one, "rogue lawyer." >> everybody is enat entitled a fair trial. some lawyers like sebastian will say what this person is accused of doing is really awful, i don't care about that, i want to make sure this person gets a pair trial. there are a few lawyers like that in the world but not many, and i always admired them because, from the very core of their being as lawyers, they believe that everybody is entitled to a fair trial. >> rose: we conclude this evening with google's laszlo bock, his new book is called "work rules! insights from inside google that will transform how you live and lead." >> every company you talk to say, you care about your people? oh, yeah, talented people are

the post important thing, but as a practical matter they don't treat them that way. it's not that managers are bad, but when you're in a position of authority, you have less information about what's going on. >> rose: politics, john grisham, and how to live and lead, when we continue. >> rose: funding for "charlie rose" has been provided by: american express. >> rose: additional funding provided by: >> and by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and information services worldwide. captioning sponsored by rose communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. >> rose: hillary clinton's testimony, paul ryan's campaign for speaker of the house, and joe biden's decision not to run

for president, those are the big political stories we're looking at this week. with me now is the political director of cbs news and anchor of "face the nation" john dickerson. joining me from washington, mike allen. mike, how did hillary clinton do today? >> well, charlie, hillary did fantastically. first, congratulations on the walter cronkite award for excellence in journalism. charlie, you had such a memorable line in your acceptance speech that i passed around to our colleagues when you said you wake up in the morning and say, what is my adventure going to be if questions have been my best friend and my power, curiosity, such a great message for all journalists. >> rose: we also emphasize writing, too, as you and dickerson have done for most of your adult life. remembering charles carrolt who said when we see a writer among

cbs we stand up and salute him or her. turning to hillary and her much-anticipated testimony today, how did she do? >> she did fantastically. her campaign, colleagues and allies very excited. what she did was very smart. she took almost a rope a dope strategy. she we wanted in, was classic, polished and her basic demeanor and approach was if you want to ask me these questions for the eighth time, i will answer them for an eighth time. and she previewed the strategy when she said earlier, i don't have a lot new to say. charlie, that's something she stuck to. >> rose: all right, glon. this was never going to be the best day for hillary clinton because this is not a period of time as secretary of state she wants to talk about. given that, she had two pitfalls. first would there be a new revelation that said she was at fault or as a leader she did something wrong. that didn't ever happen.

or the second pit fall, would there be a moment where she looked calloused or disassembling o, and that didn't happen. october was a tough month for her. she got through that and it was a long day in the seat. >> rose: obviously, we've had no cop test yet. that comes in february and throughout till the summer. does she face any big hurdle? >> still her self, probably, and her record. if she starts to be measured against hillary clinton, she's better when she's got some competition. that's why the debates went well for her, i think. so he's got amazing strength in south carolina and all the rest of the states. she's ahead in iowa and losing a little to bernie sanders in new hampshire. if that sticks, she's in fine shape. >> rose: mike, go ahead. charlie, we're seeing something we haven't seen in

many months, and that is hillary clinton ont on the offensive. she went in, republicans were gun shy because of accusations of partisanship of this committee. with the vice president out of the race, her doing well in the polls, for the first time, this campaign feels like they're getting their footing. >> picking up on mike's point, the committee had a big challenge to keep the question centered around why did this terrible thing happen in pings benghazi and use hillary clinton around that conversation. but there were periods which is what is being said is what we already knew. you had systemic failure where security was low and things weren't addressed. then wha what happened and whats hillary clinton's role. >> rose: the other issue is he asked for more support.

>> yes. >> rose: she basically said it's not the role of secretary of state, but it happened on her watch but some people held her responsible. >> yes, what the republicans were saying is e-mails were coming from the ambassador saying help me, i need security support. and other e-mails hillary clinton was involved in with blumenthal and her office where she seemed available and able to talk about anything, so why wasn't she getting messages about help me from the ambassador and there were message from libya from sidney blumenthal. that was interesting but when it went into the weeds, it quickly became one where you thought why is hillary at the center of the question. >> rose: and she made sure everyone knew ambassador stevens

was her friend. >> it's not the secretary of state's job to make sure the security was up to snuff. that's a little buck passing and people should say the buck should stop at you. on the other hand, if that's the answer she's given before, so there is nothing new coming out of this. >> rose: before we turn to joe biden, when you look at the question of the e-mails, this committee was organized to look into benghazi, then it discovered that the e-mails and they had been done on a private server. is there any potential something can come out of that story that will do damage to her down the road? mike? >> absolutely potential, and this is the worry for her campaign. you know, the campaign, you want to know what the problems are. that's why candidates vet themselves, they do opposition research on themselves. so they know the worst things that are out there. secretary clinton's campaign

doesn't know that. they don't know what of these e-mails will be recoverable. they don't know what of these e-mails might be problematic. and, charlie, here is the biggest unknown. as you and john know from covering investigations like this over many years, the problem is having the justice department looking into something is they never start with what they're going to end with. when they start looking into something, the justice department can go any number of directions. it can go over many months, and you have no idea what's going on, exactly a series of circumstances you don't want if you're trying to plan a national campaign. >> rose: okay. joe biden. >> joe biden said a long goodbye to his career when he decided not to run for president. his speech was, i'm not running, but everything he said in the speech was, boy, i really would have wanted to run and this is a

speech i would have given. >> rose: he had a message to take to the country he believed in. >> one thing that struck me about it was he said we've got to try again with republicans, we've got to think about bipartisanship. there was a dig at hillary clinton when he said republicans are not our enemies. that's an interesting notion, a notion you would expect from a guy who started his career in the early '70s, but that's not where the democratic party is now. the democratic party are thinking the republicans are a lost cause and we need to behave that way. so it's interesting to see if he could have gotten traction for that old-fashioned message, the obama message. there is not a lot of appetite for that out there. >> rose: you said this is a battle between his heart and head and for the first time his head won. >> that's exactly right. this was never going to be feasible. if you look at the hurdles for

the vice president. starting for money, he would have been paying air force two bills wherever he went, very expensive. he needed a big staff in a big hurry and most of the people who were willing to do the campaign are already spoken for, and hillary clinton would need to have some dramatic turn befall her for her to be really vulnerable. so everything the vice president has done for weeks, months, is someone who wanted to run. my colleague glen thrush said the speech he gave was the speech he's been giving in his head. the week i have been going back and forth on whether or not he was likely to run, and turns out there was a good reason for it and that is the vice president himself had been ebbing and

falling. it mr. to reported, even monday, he came in, seemed frazzled, exasperated and was demanding more operational details of what staff was immediately available, how they'd pull this off. so to the very end, the vice president looked at whether it was feasible but, for so long, people close to him have been telling us, if you're going to run, you run. someone told my colleague glen that, in the end, turned out this whole exercise was more fantasy football than football. >> rose: go ahead. somebody told me in june who was close to the vice president, he's going to drag it out to the lastment and it will be painful at the end, meaning that's the way he makes decisions like this. there were special circumstances because of his son, but he would have been a messy candidate. he not only was going to have to try to build the plane while he was flying it, starting the campaign late and doing this all at the same time, through there

is a lot of clean-ups on aisle 3 with joe biden, and there would have been a lot of -- staff needed to keep things on message. so he would have been a particular challenge in addition to all the other challenges we've talked about. >> rose: what does he do? he remains as vice president, he has an agenda of some kind, he is very concerned about cancer and he would have made that a big part of campaign, a kind of moon shot for carnes. >> that's what he talked about and this is a little arm chair psychology, if the report is true that his son asked him to run and that was part of what he was thinking about and that the his whole family message which is when you're knocked down by an emotional thing which is you get up and can you believe your avers for a cause and the cause for president would be a natural place, and the cause for cancer would be another avenue, another thing he could throw his heart and soul into. you can't get much high than vice president so it will be

fascinating to see where he takes all that energy with a life that's been constantly on assent. >> rose: mike, paul ryan for speaker of the house, where does that stand? >> paul ryan will likely be speaker. the way he came about it is fascinating, paul ryan, chairman of the ways and means committee, one of the most powerful, and the one who long dreamed of running, the one person who can bring everyone together and work with the white house, was such a great hope among top republicans that he would do it. but, charlie, he came in and drove a very hard bargain. somebody called it a reverse ransom note and that is rather than wheeling and dealing as someone usually does when they want to become speaker or have a leadership job, he issued the conditions to the right wing of his party and he said, i will

give something to you. i will have some concessions including giving more power to the committees and entertaining many of your ideas, but the speaker under me would be more powerful and he would remove the ability to faction to constantly threaten to undermine him, and they've gone along. so, charlie, looks like he's on path for paul ryan to have the gavel, something that is a big surprise, and you and i talked about the tough calculus for paul ryan and that is, if he's speaker today, he's less likely to be president in the future, so that was a tough decision. >> rose: i don't understand why that is. >> i think this is where mike's going, he's going to have a lot of tough fights because the freedom caucus still wants what it wants and paul ryan has been on the opposite side of the tea party on a number of issues, whether shutdown, raising the

debt limit or ryan-murray budget extension, all the things this group didn't like, that's where his heart, is he's closer to boehner and mccarthy in the tactical view, but those battles are coming creating scar tissue and the scar tissue, if you were going to run for president, you would have to explain or have people in the grassroots saying you sold us out on this, this and this. >> rose: let me close with the republican race. we've talked about democrats and paul ryan and the republican race. we have new polls showing ben carson beating donald trump in iowa and, at the same time, we see trump's numbers holding as the other significant fact today. >> if there was a state where you thought donald trump would have trouble is iowa. there is an evangelical vote there somebody could grab. that's not a natural constituency for donald trump. ben carson works perfectly with that group, the home schoolers in iowa who have been studying his book, the kids, the parents,

they know ben carson and like him. what's interesting, two things -- one, will trump take on ben carson or be okay with it because he's doing well everywhere else? when he's attacked other candidates, it's been okay because his base doesn't like jeb bush. so when donald trump is in a fracas with jeb bush, fine, but ben carson they like. so what's that going to look like? the second thing that interested me is ted cruz had an i'm going to emerge in iowa strategy and reach out to the evangelicals and pick up the other pockets of the areas. ben carson is at the top, then rubio and then cruz, so this puts pressure on ted cruz. he's not rising. maybe he can wait his time out but i think there is evidence he might be getting a lilt antsy. >> rose: what about jeb bush rising? >> jeb bush is not rising and rubio is. >> rose: how does the republican race look to you from

where you sit, mike? >> the factors john is outlying are another reason jeb bush has to be saying i cannot believe my life. this week coming in in single digits, collapsing in florida. the iowa numbers, you have carson rising. somebody pointed out to me that totally apart from governor bush's last name, if you look at the message of ben carson and donald trump, we don't trust them, and their anti-establishment message. it's a rebuke to bush, the family and the record. this week we saw mike murphy, the early strategist for jeb bush, now in charge of his super pac in california saying that governor bush would last until march and that, after those early states, then would be his strength. but, charlie, as you and john know, that's a tough gamble to

make. >> rose: thank you very much, mike. last word to you, sir. you will be moderating the next debate. >> the democratic debate, yeah, without joe biden, though he could get back in, charlie. (laughter) picking up on mike's point -- >> rose: it ain't over till it's over. >> that's right, and with joe biden, he runs the decisions that long, who nose. but jeb bush has to show he has some facility somewhere that would allow the scenario mike murphy talks about to happen which is okay, he takes defeats but, when the moment happens, he's there. that has yet to happen on the campaign trail. he's yet to show he has a talent to exploit at the right moment. that's the real challenge in addition to the one mike raised which is after you lose a bunch of times it's hard to get back up again. >> rose: john dickerson, mike allen, thank you so much. john grisham is here. the "new york times" said of him recently there is reasons grisham moves so many crates of

books, he's killed. he published a time to kill in 1998. now "rogue lawyer," sebastian rudd, a street lawyer who takes on cases other lawyers won't touch. nice to have john grisham back at this table. >> thank you, charlie. >> rose: this is the 28t 28th book. 28 novels, work of nonfiction, 29 a collection of stories, and five novels for young readers. >> 35. book number 35. unbelievable. stephen king's written 55. i'm trying to catch him. >> rose: a time to kill, the firm, the pelican brief, the client, the chamber, the rainmaker, the runaway jury, partner, the street lawyer, the testament, the brethren, a painted house, skipping christmas, the king of torts, bleachers, on and on. and then a theater boon books, the kid lawyer, abduction, the

accused, the activist and the fugitive. you are what they call prolific. >> yes, but, okay, that's over the last 30 years. so if you -- >> rose: it's one a year. it's one a year. i mean, charlie, i haven't worked 40 hours a week in 25 years. >> rose: don't tell me that. i don't put in those kind of hours. i write for four or five hours in the morning when i'm writing. i started a new book january 1. >> rose: is that right? that's my drop-dead goal and the goal is to finish by july 1st, six months. >> rose: and it will be published when? >> october 20th, today. >> rose: so you start january, get it to the publisher in june? >> july 1, spend a month or so doing revisions, they have a press around labor day, takes a while to print the books and come out in late october. that's the way it's been scheduled for a number of years. >> rose: do you have the presentation the critics are catching up with you? >> i continue care. >> rose: stop this. i didn't ask whether you care or

not. i said, is it your judgment you're now getting better at catching up with you? you heard me read what the "new york times" said. >> always nice to -- >> rose: i'm not asking you do you like it. the question is -- >> i' -- i'm not alawyer as goo- think at some point, in popular fiction, and probably all areas of popular culture, whether it's writing or music or film or television, even, i don't know, maybe even athletics, fashion, whatever your areas are, at some point you have been around for so long -- >> rose: that you can appreciate it. >> you do or the critics kind of at some point realize you're teflon, they leave you alone. >> rose: or realize there is something they haven't seen that they do see. >> and some books are better than others. you know, you will have a really good year with a book where you write something and think, okay -- it's hard to look back at your own stuff and judge it

and say what's better than the other books. occasionally, you write one and say this is good, you know. >> rose: my name is sebastian rudd and though i'm a well-known street lawyer, you will not see my name on billboards, bus benches or screaming at you from the yellow pages. i don't pay to be seen on television though i'm often there. my name is not listed in any phone book. i do not maintain a traditional office. i carry a gun legally because my name and face tend to attract attention from people who also carry guns and don't mind using them. i live alone, usually sleep alone and do not possess the patience necessary to maintain a friendship. the law is my life, though consuming occasionally fulfilling, i wouldn't call it a jealous mistress as one foreign person so famously did. it is more than an overbearing wife who controls a checkbook, there is no way out. pretty good.

brilliant. where do we find sebastian? >> he lives in an unnamed city of a million people. he's a lawyer who works out of his van. his chaufer is his body guard, a guy he got off in a murder trial. he takes cases nobody else will take. he's at war with prosecutors, police, politicians, big corporations. he is not above cheating. he thinks, if the police and prosecutors start cheating in a criminal trial and they often do, then that clears him to cheat as well, and he has no qualms with cheating. >> rose: he assumes they are so why not me? >> yeah, but in the course of the book, there is more law in that book, more courtroom stuff than all my other books, and, in the course of the books, you go through three different trials and in the last trial, the prosecutor -- criminal trial -- the prosecutor is not cheating, okay. so sebastian has a chance to cheat big time and he said, i'm

not going to cheat because the police and prosecutors are trying this case straight up. if they're playing straight, i'm going to play straight. when they start cheating, that legitimizes the cheating and i'm going to start cheating. >> rose: one of the pretrials has no cheating. >> yeah, he's the kind of guy you want in the foxhole when you're, you know, under attack. this is the lawyer you want. this is the pit bull who is also very, very colorful and has a lot of issues. >> rose: and enough clients because he doesn't advertise, you don't see him in the yellow pages screaming at you, he's not on television and there is no billboard that says "call sebastian." >> he doesn't make a lot of money but he makes enough to do what he wants to do. he doesn't spend a lot of money. he has no secretary, no office, no overhead. >> rose: no girlfriend? he's on the prowl but has an ex-wife that really drives him nuts. one of the compelling subplots

is the fights with his ex-wife, and they really are at war with each other. it's some funny stuff. >> rose: all this is from the imagination, all this sort of reading of john grisham? >> imagination. i was a lawyer for ten years and i always admired those lawyers who would take cases and nobody else would. charlie, there is a lot of horrible crimes and crimes are so bad nobody wants to get near them, the lawyers want to run from them. and in a lot of small counties, there is no public defender system so the cases are assigned by the judge, and there were a couple of cases when i was a young lawyer where, as soon as you heard about the trial, you hide in the off, unplug the phone and doesn't want the judge to call you. but everybody is entitled to, we believe, a fair defense, a trial. so there are always a few lawyers, not many, like sebastian who are going to step up and say, okay, what this person is accused of doing is

really, really, really awful. i don't care about that. i want to make sure this person gets a fair trial. there are a few lawyers like that in the world but not very many, and i always admired them because from the very core of their being as lawyers, they believe that everybody's entitled to a fair trial. >> rose: do you want to go back ever to the courtroom? do you want to try another case in your life? >> no, i get sued all the time, so i get dragged back to court. >> rose: why do they sue you? well, you know, they claim i stole a story. they're all frivolous. i haven't been near a courtroom in a long time. >> rose: these are lawyers or -- >> oh, they come from everywhere. they come from all over the place. most of them don't file suit, but we get a lot of letters from people threatening, hey, you stole my idea and we say, okay, here's my lawyers' response and scare them off. every lawyer gets sued. speilberg said one big lawsuit

per movie is about average. you're going to get sued by people who claim you stole stuff from them. >> rose: i think it happens in a lot of the movies. >> i have no desire to go back to court. i catch myself all the time. i'm on the board of the innocence projects. we had a lot of bad prosecutions and convictions. >> rose: people off of death row. >> and a lot is bad lawyering by the defense team. and i often think, man, i wish i could have been there and provided a good defense. i wish i could take that case or maybe a civil case. i wish i could take that case to the jury. i wish i could do that. i wish i could play for the cardinals, you know, it's just kind of fantasy world. i'm not going to back to court. >> rose: speaking of the cardinals, they're not either going to the world series. who is? >> i don't know. >> rose: why are you such a cardinal fan? >> i grew up that way in the deep south. >> rose: radio. adio. all you could pick up was

st. louis, jack buck every night. >> rose: those people were either carnal fans or cub fans, weren't they? >> i guess, w.l.s. out of chicago were very strong in the midwest. but no southern teams in the '50s and '60s. >> rose: atlanta. atlanta. i grew up around memphis and memphis is still huge. their aaa team is there, still a huge cardinal town. >> rose: do you have any ambition? >> yeah, tone the cardinals. >> rose: that is within your budget. >> probably not anymore. >> rose: well, you could own a big equity interest, borrow the rest and own the team. >> i knew the guy who owned the cardinals one time and sold the team. i said, why did you sell the cardinals? we were on the field at bush stadium watching batting tract. russo was my manager and we were

hanging out i was talking to former owner and said why sell the cardinals? he said the players union is bruting, tough dealing with them, the umpires union is tough to deal with but nothing compares to dealing with the other owners, and you look at the other owners and you think that's probably right. >> rose: how habi about commissioner of baseball? >> i don't know. it would be an awful lot of work. i've gotten laysy. gotten laysy. i'm 60 years old, playing a lot of golf, i don't want to work too hard. >> rose: if somebody said you could work 80 hours a day and you would be a much better writer, you would say i doubt that, not worth it? >> take a hike, go mind your own business. >> rose: have you made the best seller list lately? (laughter)

>> i don't work that hard and don't have to. >> rose: and you love your work. >> it's more fun now. writing "rogue lawyer" was the most fun in a long time and it's serious. there is a lot more stories to be told from sebastian rudd. i've got the kids' series going. it's so much fun. 12-year-old kids all over the country enjoy the series and write me these great letters. i have two more ideas after this one, the next novel. once i publish and "rogue lawyer" is published today, but now i'm thinking about the next book. i'm getting kind of anxious about what's going to be the next novel. i start january 1, and it's a process. >> rose: what do you need to have before you can start it? a character? >> you have to start with a plot. >> rose: what's the plot here? in "rogue"? >> rose: yeah. three trials spread over six

different sections. in that respect, it's very different. but in most of my books there is one central plot that drives a narrative for 400 pages. that's what you have to find. >> rose: what would be an example of a plot? >> if you look at the book i wrote that came out two years ago, the plot was a guy commits suicide and, right before he commits suicide, he does a handwritten will giving all his land to his black housekeeper. >> rose: i remember that. that's a pretty good first chapter. >> rose: you can develop her, him. >> 500 pages later, it's all flushed out. i'm always rookin looking for te compelling two- or three-sentence plot. i still do this, listen, i have an idea, like pitching a tv show or a movie idea, i have to pitch the story to my wife. >> rose: you know she's judge and jury. >> yeah, and it better be two-three sentences, what is your core plot. i tell young writers, if you're

writing popular fiction, give me your plot. >> rose: two or three sentences. >> two or three sentences. where are you going to go? >> rose: can't do it for this plot. >> this is different. this is a lot different and it's entertaining in a different way. >> rose: character-driven. yeah, it's character-driven. a lot of smaller plots, but all character-driven. and the plots all tie in together by the last page. >> rose: but you do good work, don't you? i'm worried about you not being busy enough, enjoying life too much and not fulfilling -- >> i'm not worried about you, charlie, i know you take care of yourself. >> rose: not fulfilling destiny. do you know brian stephenson? >> i met him in d.c. a year ago. >> rose: he's a brilliant lawyer. >> so inspirational to find this

idealestic young attorney who's done what he's done in the last ten years. >> rose: wonderful ted talk. he's great at getting people off of death row. >> it's incredible. >> rose: you take some pride in that, don't you? >> sure. i take a lot of pride in the fact that people read the books and are entertained at a certain level, but also educated at different level about certain issues, and that's what i try to do. i don't preach in every book. you can't do that when you're writing popular fiction. you entertain, the pages have to turn, but i like to include issues along the way, and there are several issues in "rogue lawyer" you come to that make the reader stop and think. that's how i approach popular fiction today is what's my next -- look at the issue of

mass incarceration, harsh sentences, the death penalty is always good, wrongful convictions and on and on and on. sentencing juveniles to life in prison. one of brian stephenson's issues, should we sentence a 14-year-old kid to prison for the rest of his life? >> rose: he also has big issues about slavery and reparations. but you are -- in your political place, what are you? you're progressive. >> i'd say progressive, moderate democrat, yeah. >> rose: the center rather han r than the left? >> yeah. i'm pretty conservative at the fiscal matters. i get sick at the spending and waste you see. i served in the legislature of mississippi for two terms and, you know, on a very much smaller scale, but there was a constitutional amendment, we had to balance the budget every

year. that's -- what's wrong with that? >> rose: that's a good idea. and we learned to do that. most states have that. but, i mean, i'm pretty progressive on social issues -- >> rose: yeah, exactly. and i think pretty conservative -- >> rose: and opposed to the death penalty? >> yeah, later in life. not when i was a lawyer but later in life. >> rose: what changed? i was at death row and i was in the holding room where they bring the guy, the condemned guy a few hours, they all had little rituals. four hours before he dies, they put him in a little room and he meets with the spiritual advisor and lawyer, then they move him to the next room where the gas chamber is and all that kind of stuff. i was talking with the chaplain at death row and he looked at me and said, mr. grisham, you're a christian, aren't you? i said, yes. he said, do you think jesus

would condone what we do here, killing people like that? and i said, at this moment, sitting here, it's hard to believe that he would condone what we're doing. he said, i don't think he would. he said, this is not right. he said, if killing is wrong, how can we justify killing? i thought, you know -- >> rose: he had you. it was hard for me to come around after being raised in that very conservative southern baptist mentality, an eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth, all this kind of stuff, it was very hard. some of the crimes you read of and some of the people i met on death row defy description, you can't believe how brute the crimes are, and to show compassion for these people, it's very difficult. >> rose: the book is called "rogue lawyer," one more by john grisham. you've done it again. my goodness. >> now available at fine book

stores everywhere. >> rose: or online or wherever else you can buy it. >> today it's everywhere. >> rose: congratulations. thank you, my pleasure. >> rose: klein narks i'm told, is going to have a fantastic team. carolina. off hot prospect come in? >> they have almost everybody back from last year. pre-season polls are hit or miss, duke is four or five, virginia's six. >> rose: but carolina is your team. >> i pull for the tar heels. we go to all uva home games. i saw you there. great young coach, tony bennett. he doesn't do the one and done thing. he gets kids in for four years, really class kids, quality kids, he teaches them his system. >> rose: mike's had one and

done, several of them. >> last year was amazing for duke to have the four freshmen and they got better with every game, you could see them coming. but the coach turns them pro for a million bucks. can't blame the kids. it's just a bad rule. >> rose: i think maybe you should run as governor of virginia. >> charlie, why ruin a good life? i'm not getting back into politics, okay? i have nothing to offer. i wouldn't last. you would want five years in a helicopter to go to all the basketball games. (laughter) >> rose: laszlo bock is here, senior vice president of people operations in google. assumed the role in 2006. the company has grown from 6,000 to almost 60,000 employees. google is consistently ranked a

best employer by fortune magazine and others. parent holding company of alphabet earlier this year. laszlo's written a book, "work rules! insights from inside google that will transform how you live and lead" i am pleased to have him at this table for the first time. welcome. >> thank you. it's a pleasure. >> rose: tell me what the book is about. work rules to transform how you will live and lead, an inside look at how you shape how people work. >> yeah, well, there is two pieces to it. one is i had a realization we spent more time working than anything else in your life. more than with your loved ones and friends. for most people, it kind of sucks, not a great experience. so at google, we have been able to experiment and test and try to bring more meaning to work. the idea behind the book is what have we done that we can share and what lessons have others

learned to share and make things better. >> rose: what did you discover? >> there were a few things. one is we make really bad decisions. we as individuals make really bad decisions. >> rose: about our own work life? >> ability work life, hiring, how we assess people, because we're all fundamentally biased and all fend mentally go through life thinking we ear right but we don't actually go back and test it or even look back. like you imagine, business executives always sit around and say, i have to fire all these people. well, they hired these people. something is going wrong. we have to figure out what to do to avoid those mistakes. >> rose: i once read if you fire someone and it's a surprise to them, then you have failed. >> i think he's right. there is something about feedback and honesty and directness that we owe to people, but again, as a manager, that's a really uncomfortable conversation. it's no fun telling somebody

they need to get better and coaching and working with them, but you have an obligation to do it because that's the fair and just thing. we try to figure out ways to take the pressure off the manager. >> rose: you want to take the power away from the manager. >> as much as we can. >> rose: and give it to? the employees, the workers, the people. >> rose: how would you do that because that's a crucial ingredient of what you argue. >> there is. there is a number of things. >> rose: direction and the rest. >> we take power away from editors but not allowing them to decide who to hire, to promote or decide how much to pay somebody. as a being, your job should be to make the team better and people more effective. but if they're afraid of you or trying to kiss your butt because they want to advance and want some of the awards, you're not going to get their authentic work and see their best work, you will be focused on the wrong

things. strip that away and all that's left is for the manager to help. you either think people are good or evil. if they're good, you're going to trust them, give them information and, in general, they're going to do the right thing. and every company you talk to you say, you know, do you care about your people? oh, yeah, talented people are the most important thing but as a practical matter they don't treat them that way. it's not that managers are bad or evil or misguided, when you're in a position of authority you don't have as much information about what's going on because you're not in the meetings. if you're a finance manager, your -- >> rose: but if you have the right relationship you will know. >> it's not as efficient as trusting them. when you become a manager, you behave fundamentally different than an individual doing your job. when you're an individual you care about what are my goals and how to get there.

the manager should inform on how to set goals. we did literature on performance and the only thing that matters is goal setting. you need to have goals. management is critical for that. as an employee, you want the manager to get out of the way and let you get the work done. but what happens once you're a manager is you micromanage, not because you're a bad person but you want to make sure the work gets done. >> rose: a smart manager empowers the people who work with him. >> there's a lot of research. if you look at 50 different studies that create 300 different companies and you try to figure out what improves productivity, all the different techniques, he found the one thing was giving people general guidance and giving them the freedom to get things done. >> rose: one thing i've elearned is delegate and give freedom to a lot of people on the firing line. >> what i would add is it's important to have goals and make

those goals transparent so, at google, for example, we have objectives and key results, it's a goal setting system, but every quarter everyone sets goals and they're visible to everyone in the company, so as a manager you're involved in that, you can help set those and can see what everyone is doing. you need is essential high-level alignment and people do great things. >> rose: the most important thing is for erved to understand how they can make the team better, how their contribution, their contribution is essential to the overall contribution. it's like a football team. >> absolutely. but the reality is, in most workplaces, it doesn't end up that way. >> rose: why is that? i think part of it is people live in fear in a lot of workplaces because anybody who is a manager also has a manager. they want to make sure they look good, deliver, do the right things. so instead of doing every sing time what they think is the right or best thing for our customer, for example, they'll say here's the rule, the policy,

and will say what does my manager want and i'm going to do that, so you have these incentives where work is a controlling place rather than where you get meaning out of it. >> rose: you talk about intellectual humility. how does that play? >> yeah, it's one of the things we recruit for at google. the idea is you don't have to have regular humility, yo you cn have a big ego, but intellectual ego is when you get new information, you recognize it. a story about winston churchill who was questioned by a reporter and he changed positions on something and looked down from the podium and said when the facts change, so do my opinions. what do you do, you need to admit it or else you won't learn and grow. the constant learning is key to growth and success. >> rose: be open all the time to new information, ideas and facts.

>> that's right. how do we recruit?hat mistake we don't really focus on where you went to school, what your grades were. we focused on what you've done and accomplished in your trajectory. we cast a wide net in the sense of we get 3 million applications a year and the number goes up every year. but the very best people aren't looking for jobs because they're doing great work. they're doing great value and high-performance things. so you're spending a lot of time and effort, looking at people, cultivating over time and hoping some day they'll have a bad day at work and join us. >> rose: what's the x factor you look for even though they might not have gone to the right school, may not have the right degree, might not have all the widening experience someone in different environment has had? >> the single biggest redistricter of whether someone will be successful across almost any profession is what we call general cognitive ability. it's not i.q. testing because those have all kind of racial

and gender bias and problems with them, but the ability to solve a wide range of problems and adapt your thinking. we look for that number one. the second thing we look for is leadership, and it's a particular kind we call emergent leadership, and that is not just you're president to have the chess club or captain of the football team or president, it's when you see a problem you step in and try to solve it even when it's not your job. most importantly, you relinquish power. larry and sergey could have run this anyway they wand but they said you figure it out and pulled back. the third thing is around googliness, which boils down to intellectual humanity. we want them to think like owners. >> rose: because you have an invested interest and success enhances you.

>> what's wild is at google we tried to cultivate that by every employee gets stock when they join, eligible for stock each year, but even companies that don't have stock, a great grocery klain in the northeast called wegmen's. people rave about it. their workforce are largely high school graduates, a family-owned firm, margins are 1 to 2%, completely different environment, but they still instill a sense of ownership and meaning and autonomy in the worked and it's served them well for 60, 70 years even though a very different business. >> rose: lesson one through ten -- give your work meaning, trust your people, if you give freedom they will amaze you, hire people only who are better than you. >> yeah. >> rose: those are the people you learn from. >> well, honestly, yes, you learn, they do great work but it's kind of selfish as well.

if you're hiring people better than you, your job gets easier, so you want to look for that. one of the thing larry and sergey observed early on is startups -- they started with a quartequarter of amazing peopled the next are pretty good and the third not so much because each concentric ring doesn't know what to look for. it typically gets worse and the company reverts over time. hire people bert than you and the company will get stronger. >> rose: four, don't confuse development with managing performance. five, focus on two tails, the biggest opportunities lie in your absolutely worst and best employees. absolutely worst? >> absolute worst. part of the premise is you're doing hiring in a thoughtful, unbiased, objective way, which means you don't have to fire a

lot of people, as you pointed out earlier. in our case, what happens is we actually go through and identify our bottom 5% but it doesn't affect the ratings or bonus because you might have a team where everyone's doing a good job. there is still a bottom person on the team. we tell them and try to get them better. we find about a third of the time they get better, two-thirds they don't and we have them switch jobs. and 80% of the time there, so about 50% overall, they actually get a lot better. we've put them in the wrong job. not that they're bad people. h.r. departments typically make the assumption that human performance follows the normal distribution. you have the top ten, bottom ten, middle. if you look at sports, it follows the power law distribution. there are a few people who are exceptionally better than anybody else that they pull the whole curve up, and if you plot

sort of average performance across some of these industries, what you will find is most people in basketball actually perform below average because the exceptional people are so rose: it's an interesting argument, i don't know the results or necessarily have an opinion, but some people will say you need a couple of superstars, but you don't need five superstars, because if you have too many superstars, they will begin to step all over each other. >> that gets, again, to hiring in the kind of profile you're looking for. if you have people who can work together, who are intellectually humble. doesn't matter if they have huge egos. if they can admit information, and say, i'm amazing but i was wrong on these things and i'm going to do it differently, you get as many superstars as you can. >> rose: nudge a lot, small signals can change large changes in behavior. you know what i think -- you wrote the book and are the expert -- is that we think we're praising but we're not praising enough where justified.

people who are managers. >> we're not praising -- >> rose: well, in other words, you think you're praising someone, you think you're nudging, you think you're giving credit where credit is deserved, but not in their perception recognizing enough. >> the academic research on this shows that people feel negative feedback with ten times the intensity of positive feedback. and most positive feedback is also not particularly specific, right? negative feedback is you screwed up this presentation and you're a bonehead. positive feedback is great job, attaboy. so if you want to have a positive impact, you not only need to be frequent but you need to be specific. so somebody knows when you were sitting at the table, you leaned across this way and that was great. >> rose: and manage the rising expectations. >> my thesis is that basically there is two ways to run a

business and make a lot of money. one is you can treat people pretty badly, and there is enough people who need work that they're going to take a job and you can grind through them. the other thing we try to do is treat people well, you get more for it. what happens is as soon as you say we're going to do these great things for you, people habituate. imagine getting a salary increase. first one is amazing, three months later you spend it, dent feel good anymore. so try it, embark on a journey and see how it goes. >> rose: number ten is go back to number one and start all over. >> yes. w that there is an alphabett holding company? >> what's nice is they've built a great business so they clearly know what they're doing. what they're really exceptional at and sort of seeing around the corner ten or 15 years out and that's what they want to focus

on and better. >> rose: "work rules! insights from inside google that will transform how you live and lead," laszlo bock. thank you for joining us. see you next time. for more about this program and earlier episodes, visit us online at pbs.org and charlierose.com captioning sponsored by rose communications captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org

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