You had to have eight direct reports at Google to be a manager, but there was no upper limit. People had 10, 15, 20, even 100 direct reports to minimize middle management. It would likely have been more managerially efficient to give someone no more than eight people. However, Google chose a flat organization that sacrificed that kind of efficiency to achieve an extreme focus on technology development. Microsoft, on the other hand, followed a more classical and hierarchical approach.

　　在Google，你做为一个经理，必须有8个直接的汇报，没有上限。为了减少中间管理层级，有人可能有10个，15个，20个，甚至100个直接的汇报关系。从管理效率上讲，一个人的汇报不要超过8个。但是Google选择了一个扁平的组织，牺牲了管理效率，以极大地关注技术开发。另一方面，微软采用了更为经典的分级的方法。

　　HBR：That reminds me of Google’s decision to hire only people with very high GPAs from elite universities. As a heuristic, there’s obviously collateral damage—there are many smart people you’re not allowed to hire—but it makes sense if your goal is to hire a large number of smart generalists quickly.

　　这让我想起Google决定只雇用精英大学GPA非常高的人。作为直觉，这有明显的副作用— 有许多聪明的人不能被雇用— 但如果你的目标是快速招聘大量的聪明通才，这是有道理的。

　　That created a lot of frustration. “I can’t hire my friend who doesn’t have that qualification, but I know that he’s really good.” And the company says, “Yeah, sorry. That’s the way we execute as we blitzscale. We need a simple heuristic so that we can focus on what really matters.” Another benefit of Google’s decision to hire only from elite universities is that it helped create and maintain a coherent culture as the company scaled.

　　这造成了很多挫折。“我不能雇用我的朋友，他资格不符。但我知道他真的很好。” 公司说：“是的，对不起。这是我们闪电扩张采取的方式。我们需要一个简单的直觉方法，以便我们可以专注于真正重要的事情。“ Google决定仅从精英大学雇用的另一个好处是，当公司扩张的时候，有助于创建和维护一个连续的文化。

　　HBR：Why is culture so important to blitzscaling?

　　为什么文化对闪电扩张如此重要？

　　Because you’re growing an organization very fast, you have to make people accountable to each other on a horizontal or peer-to-peer basis, and not just vertically and top-down through the hierarchy.

　　因为你当你快速扩张一个组织的时候，你必须使人们在一个水平上或点对点的基础上彼此负责，而不仅仅是通过等级结构在垂直和自上而下的维度上。

　　HBR：What other heuristics are important as you go from, say, village to city?

　　从村庄规模到城市规模，有什么其他直觉是非常重要的呢？

　　Specialization at all levels becomes more important. You need to understand how to run a large-scale engineering department, for example, and how to deploy a significant amount of capital in marketing. You need dashboards and analytics and metrics for those functions as much as you need them to help you understand customers and the marketplace.