Schmidt and Rosenberg build their argument around a not entirely convincing declaration of humility. They were the old-timers at Google, the last “to ditch their BlackBerrys and Outlook email boxes.” They were hired to be the adult supervision during the company’s chaotic early years and found a freewheeling work environment that undermined all their previous notions about running companies. Google employees treated work as an extension of their academic careers and had a peevish disregard for conventional management practices. “The only thing we could say for sure back then was that much of what the two of us had learned in the 20th century was wrong, and that it was time to start over,” they write.

So they had to come up with something else. At the center of their new management framework are “smart creatives”: those unusually intelligent, self-motivated employees who are responsible for coming up with the next big thing. Companies need to hire and keep them, but smart creatives aren’t necessarily dazzled by perks like high salaries and corner offices. They seek meaning in their work and approach their careers with an inflated sense of missionary zeal that would send the writers of HBO’s “Silicon Valley” scurrying for their notebooks. Successful companies must start thinking about their culture early on, the authors write, and fashion direct, inspiring mission statements (“Don’t be evil”) that might sound disingenuous to outsiders but that actually motivate employees.

Most of these lessons have hardened into conventional wisdom and will not surprise anyone already steeped in Silicon Valley’s infectious dogma. Trust your engineers and say yes to them as often as possible. Stay flexible in planning. Power should derive from merit and insight, not tenure or salary. Launch quickly, iterate and don’t be afraid to fail.

Other insights, in chapters devoted to strategy, hiring, decision-making and innovation, offer worthy examples for other leaders. Every project at Google is begun with a new technical insight; Gmail, for example, was initiated after the Google engineer Paul Buchheit recognized that the Internet had progressed to a point at which he could build a web-based email tool that was just as rich and complex as any downloadable software program. And product design should reflect a user’s needs, not the organization’s. “You should never be able to reverse engineer a company’s organizational chart from the design of its product,” the authors write, citing the horror that is the typical television remote control.

One chapter is devoted to Google’s unique hiring process, the most important practice at any company, the authors note. Companies should pursue versatile “learning animals” whose private passions suggest dedication and personal pride. Decisions on hiring and promotions at Google are peer-based, reached by committees of employees instead of individual hiring managers. There is good advice here for keeping interviews short, to the point and revealing, though it’s not quite a full accounting of Google’s evolution in this area: The company mostly abandoned the use of SAT scores in its hiring, which isn’t addressed here.