Eric Schmidt's Burning Question

More goodies from Ken Auletta's new book Googled. When Eric Schmidt applied for the CEO gig, Larry Page and Sergey Brin weren't exactly thrilled to see him. In fact, they didn't really want a CEO at all, but the VCs who were funding them insisted on hiring "adult supervision." So they subjected Schmidt to a battery of rigorous tests, including something called the "airplane test." It's fairly simple: If you had to sit next to this guy on an airplane, they asked themselves, would he be interesting enough to talk to for the next five hours?

Fortunately, Schmidt wowed them with one ace up his sleeve: He was a Burner. "He passed the airplane test when he revealed that he, too, was a regular attendee at Burning Man," Auletta wrote. "How much of a suit could he be?"

Even so, settling in at Google (GOOG) could be tricky. How would Schmidt handle the unique, let-the-engineers-play-in-the-sandbox culture at the GooglePlex? Here's how. "Schmidt was assigned a small office containing two desks, but before he arrived an engineer looking for a place to park spotted the empty office and moved in," Auletta writes. "According to Rajeev Motwani, who continued to advise his Stanford proteges, when Schmidt arrived he assessed the situation and quietly took the second desk. 'They became office mates. Can you imagine a company where an engineer can move into the CEO's office? That tells you a lot about Eric, and about the company. He understood the company's DNA, which is that what you do defines your importance.' "