When loving where you work becomes a problem

Below, Claire Stapleton shares five key insights from her new book, Don’t Be Evil: Bad Bosses, Fake Promises, and My Escape From Big Tech. Stapleton spent 12 years at Google, joining straight out of college in 2007 and rising to become a senior communications leader at YouTube. In 2018, she co-organized the Google Walkout—in which 20,000 employees protested the company’s handling of sexual harassment—and left Google shortly after. Don’t Be Evil is her memoir about that journey. What’s the Big Idea? Almost all of us spend our waking lives inside institutions of one kind or another. We navigate their promises, absorb their values, and often mistake their identity for our own. Don’t Be Evil is a story about Google—but it’s really a story about how any of us navigate power, ambition, loyalty, and conscience inside the organizations we give our working lives to. The question it keeps asking is deceptively simple: where do you end, and where does the place you work begin? Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Stapleton herself—in the Next Big Idea app, or buy the book. 1. The institution you work for tells a story about itself—and it could become yours. When I joined Goo…