Every company has a phrasebook. Think like an owner. We’re a family here. Bring your whole self to work. Don’t be evil. They’re all good sentences, and they all work right up until someone inside the company takes them literally.

That moment is the heart of Claire Stapleton’s “Don’t Be Evil,” her account of thirteen years at Google. Stapleton was the company’s in-house voice, the “Bard of Google,” and by her own account a true believer. In 2018 she helped organize the Google Walkout, when roughly twenty thousand employees left their desks to protest how the company handled sexual misconduct claims against senior leaders. Within a year, she was gone.]

It was the first pick for Read Responsibly, the new Veerless book club for people who spend their working lives thinking about how companies behave. We planned to record the conversation for the podcast. About twenty minutes in, people started telling real stories, and we changed course. Read Responsibly now runs on Chatham House rules, so you won’t hear the session. You will hear what I took away from it, in a new solo episode of Table Stakes. Here are the five takeaways.

1. Accountability flows upward

Google asked employees to “think like an owner” and sent them through a training called Conscious Business, which taught them to be “players,” not “victims.” Stapleton describes the result as taking responsibility not only for your own actions but for the conditions around you, “absorbing blame upward and outward until there was nothing left to question.”

Accountability is a good thing. It’s supposed to flow upward, though. When the buck stops at the top, people trust the system. When it stops with the person who has the least power, you get a culture where raising a problem feels like whining.

2. A walkout means the room already failed

Google told its people to hold the company to its values. In 2018, they did, and Stapleton describes the walkout as a pro-Google act of loyalty. Then the retaliation came, and she seemed surprised by it. I wasn’t.

As someone who has spent years advocating for whistleblower hotlines and non-retaliation policies, my first question about any walkout (Google, Wayfair in 2019, Netflix in 2021) is what people tried first. My second question matters more. When employees skip the internal channels and go straight to the sidewalk, it usually means they’ve stopped trusting the room. That’s a governance problem, not an employee problem.

3. “Nothing major” is a major problem

The hardest passage in the book describes a senior executive gripping Stapleton around the waist at a bar after a company event. She later called it “a little inappropriate, nothing major,” and wrote that it “barely raised an alarm bell.”

Stapleton doesn’t use the term sexual harassment. I will. Almost every woman I know who has worked in a corporate setting has a “nothing major” story, and a culture of radical accountability turns those moments into something the recipient is expected to manage alone. One reader in our session put it plainly: this kind of culture normalizes misconduct and makes the recipient part of the problem.

4. Support doesn’t end with the flowers and condolences

When Stapleton’s brother died, Google was generous: time off, condolence notes, flowers. Then, she writes, it was “pretty much never mentioned again.” Maternity leave followed the same pattern. Support on the way out, business as usual the moment she came back.

Generous leave policies matter. In an all-in culture, though, the norms that greet people when they return matter more. Those norms come from the top. If leaders don’t take real leave, nobody else will believe they can.

5. Values only count if someone can hold you to them

Two moments in the book make this point from opposite ends. Stapleton writes an email for Larry Page that comes back with no edits, and calls it “so empty, so artless a regurgitation of meaninglessness.” Years earlier, Google had mailed hard copies of the 2004 founders’ letter, where “Don’t be evil” first appeared, to people’s homes.

An empty letter nobody edits can’t be held to anything. A letter on your kitchen table can. For those of us who write CEO letters and sustainability reports, that’s the challenge: write toward where leaders should go, not only where they already are. If your report comes back unedited, it might mean you nailed it. It might also mean you didn’t ask for anything.

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Where we landed

Stapleton ends the book with a line we kept coming back to: “There is no finish line. There’s only a constant process of trying to figure it out, of tuning in to your own voice and sense of what matters.”

Google told its people not to be evil. When they saw something that looked like evil, they pushed back. In a strange way, that’s the slogan doing its job.

Listen to the episode

Join Read Responsibly

Read Responsibly is a free lunch-hour book club from Veerless for people working in corporate responsibility, ethics, communications, and reputation. Conversations run on Chatham House rules, so you can speak freely. We’re choosing our next book now. Vote on LinkedIn and follow Veerless to learn more about our events.