Google capped a year when it hired about 7,000 people, the most intense growth spurt in the search giant's 13-year history, with perhaps the pre-eminent human relations title in corporate America, moving up from fourth to first on Fortune's annual pecking order of the 100 Best Companies to Work For.

"Employees rave about their mission, the culture, and the famous perks of the Plex: bocce courts, a bowling alley, eyebrow shaping (for a fee) in the New York office," Fortune wrote.

There's no doubt that there are substantial perks to working at Google -- ranging from the new 40,000 square-foot park that the company built for its employees at its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters last year, to the fleet of electric Chevy Volts and Nissan Leafs that Googlers can check out for free to run errands at lunch time. But the search giant says it won the Best Place to Work title not because it focuses on perks, but because it focuses on people.

"What people often focus on are the flashy, showy things, like the massages and the food, which are important to us," said Laszlo Bock, Google's senior vice president for people operations. "But they are not the real story about what makes our culture work."

The real story, Bock and other Google executives said in a series of interviews this week about the company's culture, is that Google treats employees as the owners of the company, that it has an ethic of corporate transparency that allows rank and file workers to question and expect honest answers from their superiors -- even CEO Larry Page, at the company's weekly "TGIF"...