Steve Jobs explain Management by Values

Key takeaways:

• Finding great people is the most important lesson in business due to the large variance in quality.

• Great people are often missionaries, not mercenaries.

• Individual contributors can be phenomenal even when management and culture is poor.

• Passion for the company can be a motivating factor for employees.

Transcript:

Speaker 1

There's a huge variance in the quality of people. You've already experienced that. And so you have to go for great. That's been the most important lesson that I've learned in business. That the dynamic range of people dramatically exceeds things you encounter in the rest of our normal lives. And to try to find those really great people who really, really love what they do. And there's also an element that their missionaries don't have mercenaries and he's talking about this. Listen, when I returned to Apple in 1997, so that'd be six years before he's talking about this, the individual contributors were phenomenal. The individual contributors, right? The management and the overall company culture was terrible. Obviously you and I talked about this when we went over Johnny Ives. Excellent, excellent biography. And so I'm sure Johnny's one of these people and he says, I asked a lot of these guys, why did you stay? And they said, because we bleed six colors. I heard that from a lot of people. There were six colors in the old Apple logo. So I bleed Apple colors, right? It was management that was a problem. So we actually got rid of most of the management team and promoted a lot of these young people into management positions. This is Steve's very unique perspective on management. And what I found is that nobody in their right mind wants to be a manager. It's true. It's a lot of work and you don't get to do the fun stuff. But the only good reason to be a manager is so some other bozo doesn't be the manager and ruin the group that you care about. And so he continues about management. And this is why I think people love Steve. They just love people that are unfiltered. That we all think this, but no one talks about it. We all play this like this fake game with this jargon and pretend like we're not all humans underneath. And so what he's talking about, I study management in school. Like, you know, it's just, I agree with what he's saying here. It's what I'm saying. There's a lot of management techniques. It's all crock. And a really smart guy I met a long time ago who used to teach at Disney University. Walt Disney himself recruited this guy to run Disney. He told me about his point of view. Steve has what? 30 years of three decades of experience running companies at this point. And he's like, but I like what this guy that ran Disney University actually said. And he says he called it management by values. What that means is you find people that want the same things you want. And so he's going to tell this in an analogy. We're all going to take a trip together. The first thing is to figure out where we all want to go. The worst thing is if we all decide we want to go to different places, you can never manage it. This guy wants to go to New Orleans. You want to go somewhere else. I want to go to San Francisco. You want to go to San Diego. That doesn't work. But if we all say we all want to go to San Diego, that's the key. Then we can argue about how to get there. You think it's better to take a plane. You think it's better to take a train. We'll figure that part out because if I say I want to take a train to San Diego and somebody says that's really stupid. It'll take three days. We can fly and be there in an hour. I'll go, oh, okay. Actually, I want to go to San Diego. If I can get there in an hour flying, I'll ditch my idea about the train. That's what management by values is. It's finding people with passion. There's that word again. It's finding people with passion that want to go to San Diego who want to go to the same place you want to go. That is the key. Then he goes into, okay, now we have agreed to where we want to go. How do we do that? His whole point is you figure it out along the way. That's what you get paid to do. If you want to preserve something, what you want to do is have a good enough place to go. That's got a long enough focal length that it will survive over time that everybody agrees on and not codify how you're going to get there. That's one of my mantras around Apple and Pixar because the people that you recruit, this is what we just talked about. Everything with Steve is going to come back to the quality of the people that you have around you. That's one of my mantras around Apple and Pixar. That recruiting is the most important thing that you do. Finding the right people that is half the battle. Based on my understanding of Steve's throughout this reading, I think the person that was most influential on how he managed when he came back to Apple was actually the time he spent With Ed Catmull, seeing how Ed Catmull actually ran Pixar. Ed said something over and over again in his autobiography, Creativity Inc. About this. It's very similar to what Steve's saying here. If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better. I think that adds context into why Steve keeps repeating that recruiting is the most important thing that you do. Finding the right people is half the battle.

Founders • #299 Steve Jobs