In 1984, Apple tried hiring “professional management.”
Steve Jobs: “It didn’t work at all.”
“Most of them were bozos.”
“They knew how to manage. But they didn’t know how to do anything.”
He spent 4 minutes explaining what actually works:
"The greatest people are self-managing. They don't need to be managed."
"Once they know what to do, they'll go figure out how to do it. They don't need to be managed at all."
"What they need is a common vision. And that's what leadership is."
"Having a vision. Being able to articulate it so the people around you can understand it. And getting a consensus on a common vision."
So who should manage?
"If you're a great person, why do you want to work for somebody you can't learn anything from?"
"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."
Apple hired two professional managers from outside the company. Fired them both.
Then Jobs gambled on Debbie Coleman. A member of the Macintosh team. 32 years old. English literature major with an MBA from Stanford.
A financial manager with no experience in manufacturing. Put in charge of manufacturing.
Debbie Coleman: "There's no way in the world anybody else would give me this chance to run this kind of operation. I don't kid myself about that."
"It's an incredible high risk. Both for myself personally and professionally. And for Apple as a company. To put a person like myself in this job."
"We're betting that my skills at organizational effectiveness override all lack of technology, lack of experience, lack of time in manufacturing."
"I'm just an example. Almost every single person on the Mac team, you could say that about."
"This is a place where people were afforded incredibly unique opportunities to prove they could write the book again."
Hiring was the most important job.
"I consider the most important job of someone like myself is recruiting."
"We agonized over hiring."
"Interviews would start at 9 or 10 in the morning and go through dinner."
"A new interviewee would talk to everybody in the building. At least once. Maybe a couple times."
"Then come back for another round of interviews. Then we'd all get together and talk about it."
"And then they'd fill out an application."
He laughs.
"No. They never filled out an application."
Here's how they knew someone was right.
"The critical part of the interview, at least to my mind, was when we finally decided we liked them enough to show them the Macintosh prototype."
"We sat them down in front of it."
"If they were just kind of bored, or said 'this is a nice computer,' we didn't want them."
"We wanted their eyes to light up. For them to get really excited."
"Then we knew they were one of us."
Once you get the right people, something changes.
"When you get a core group of ten great people, it becomes self-policing as to who they let into that group."
"Everybody just wanted to work. Not because it was work that had to be done."
"But because it was something we really believed in. That was going to really make a difference."
"We all wanted exactly the same thing. Instead of spending our time arguing about what the computer should be, we all knew what the computer should be."
"And we just went and did it."
Inside the casing of every Macintosh, unseen by the consumer, are the signatures of the whole team.
Apple's way of affirming that their innovation is a product of the individuals who created it. Not the corporation.
This 4 minute video will teach you more about hiring, leadership, and why professional managers fail than every business book combined.
Bookmark & give it 4 minutes today, no matter what.