Great Managers, according to Steve Jobs

“You know who the best managers are? They’re the great individual contributors, who never ever want to be a manager, but decide they have to be a manager because no one else is going to be able to do as good a job as them.”

Steve Jobs

Transcript:

00:03
The greatest people are self-managing.
00:04
They don’t need to be managed.
00:06
If they know–
00:07
Once they know what to do,
00:09
they’ll go figure out how to do it,
00:10
and they don’t need to be managed at all.
00:12
What they need is a common vision,
00:14
and that’s what leadership is.
00:16
What leadership is having a vision,
00:18
being able to articulate that so the people around you can understand it,
00:22
and getting a consensus on a common vision.
00:25
We wanted people that were insanely great at what they did,
00:29
but were not necessarily those seasoned professionals,
00:33
but who had at the tips of their fingers
00:36
and in their passion the latest understanding of where technology was
00:40
and what we could do with that technology,
00:42
and we wanted to bring that to lots of people.
00:44
So the neatest thing that happens
00:45
is when you get a core group of, you know, ten great people,
00:50
it becomes self-policing as to who they let into that group.
00:54
So I consider the most important job of someone like myself is recruiting.
00:59
We agonized over hiring.
01:01
We had interviews.
01:02
I’d go back and look at some of the interviews again.
01:04
They would start at 9:00 or 10:00 in the morning and go through dinner.
01:08
A new interviewee would talk to everybody in the building at least once
01:11
and maybe a couple times,
01:13
and then come back for another round of interviews,
01:15
and then we’d all get together and talk about it.
01:17
And then they’d fill out an application.
01:18
[laughing]
01:19
No, they never filled out an application.
01:21
The critical part of the interview, at least to my mind,
01:22
was when we finally decided we liked them enough
01:25
to show them the Macintosh prototype
01:27
and then we sat them down in front of it.
01:28
If they were just kind of bored, or said “This is a nice computer,”
01:31
we didn’t want them.
01:32
We wanted their eyes to light up
01:34
and for them to get really excited,
01:35
and then we knew they were one of us.
01:37
And everybody just wanted to work.
01:39
Not because it was work that had to be done,
01:41
but it was because something we really believed in
01:43
that was just going to really make a difference.
01:45
And that’s what kept the whole thing going.
01:47
We all wanted exactly the same thing,
01:48
instead of spending our time arguing about what the computer should be.
01:53
We all knew what the computer should be,
01:54
and we just went and did it.
01:56
We went through that stage in Apple where we went out and thought oh,
01:58
we’re gonna be a big company, let’s hire professional management.
02:01
We went out and hired a bunch of professional management–
02:03
02:04
It didn’t work at all.
02:05
Most of them were bozos.
02:06
They knew how to manage,
02:08
but they didn’t know how to do anything!
02:10
And so, if you’re a great person,
02:11
why do you want to work for somebody you can’t learn anything from?
02:14
And you know what’s interesting,
02:17
you know who the best managers are?
02:19
They’re the great individual contributors,
02:22
who never ever want to be a manager,
02:25
but decide they have to be a manager
02:27
because no one else is going to be able to do as good a job as them.
02:31
[male narrator] After hiring two professional managers
02:33
from outside the company and firing them both,
02:35
Jobs gambled on Debby Coleman, a member of the Macintosh team.
02:40
Thirty-two years old,
02:41
an English Literature major with an MBA from Stanford,
02:44
Debbie was a financial manager with no experience in manufacturing.
02:49
I mean, there’s no way in the world anybody else
02:53
would give me this chance to run this kind of operation,
02:55
and I don’t kid myself about that.
02:57
It’s an incredible, high risk
02:59
both for myself, personally and professionally,
03:01
and for Apple as a company,
03:02
to put a person like myself in this job.
03:04
I mean, they’re really betting on a lot of things.
03:07
We’re betting that my skills at organizational effectiveness,
03:11
you know, override all lack of technology,
03:14
lack of experience, lack of, you know, time in manufacturing.
03:18
So, it’s a big risk,
03:19
and I’m just an example in every single person on the Mac team,
03:23
almost to your entry-level person,
03:25
you could say that about.
03:27
This is a place where people were afforded incredibly unique opportunities
03:32
to prove that they could do–
03:33
–they could write the book again.
03:36
[narrator] Inscribed inside the casing of every Macintosh,
03:39
unseen by the consumer,
03:40
are the signatures of the whole team.
03:43
This is Apple’s way of affirming that their latest innovation
03:45
is a product of the individuals who created it,
03:47
not the corporation.
03:49