Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, Grand Central, 286 pages, $30

As a service, Google has become indispensable to people's interactions online. Yet in terms of management, it has set up radically new ways of organizing itself. Few people have focused on this.

Now two of Google's architects have analyzed what they think worked and why. Eric Schmidt, the current chairman and former chief executive, and Jonathan Rosenberg, a former senior manager, decrypt the firm's methods for other business leaders to learn from.

The core of Google's method is the empowering of employees, a culture that places huge emphasis on hiring top talent. Google has devised systems to enable good ideas from any quarter to get an airing. Many of Google's biggest products and features (like Gmail) have emerged from this, and also from a policy that lets staff work on pet projects for 20 percent of their time.

In large part Google grew because it threw out the traditional MBA playbook; its success speaks for itself. However, this underscores a shortcoming of "How Google Works." The experience of Schmidt and Rosenberg is so colored by Google's accomplishments that many of their recommendations best apply to managing teams of aces in lucrative, fast-growing markets, not to overseeing a wide range of talent in low-margin businesses — the life of most managers.

Google's practices can be usefully incorporated into all sorts of businesses in all kinds of ways. But most bosses achieve and retain their positions by safely maintaining an organization, not changing it. Few will transform their firms even if they are armed with the management formula that the book reveals. All the more reason, then, to celebrate Google's unique achievement.

THE ECONOMIST