Steve Jobs felt hiring professional management for Apple ‘didn’t work at all, most of them bozos’ — Here’s what he did
Apple co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs felt that hiring professional management “didn’t work at all” for the consumer tech giant when they wanted to grow and had plans to expand it.
Stating that “most (professional managers) are simpletons who only know about management and don’t know how to do the job,” Jobs instead felt that the best managers were “great individual contributors who never wanted to be managers” but were those who stood out according to the need of the hour.
‘Hiring professional management didn’t work at all’
In a 1985 clip, speaking about early hiring during Apple’s expansion plans, Steve Jobs said: “We went through that phase at Apple, we got out of there and thought, ‘we’re going to be a big company, let’s hire professional managers.’ We went and hired a bunch of professional managers, and it didn’t work at all.”
He explained: “Most of them were idiots. They knew how to get by, but they didn’t know how to do anything. So, if you’re a great person, why would you want to work for someone you can’t learn anything from?”
Who are the best managers according to Steve Jobs?
Explaining who the best managers are, Jobs said: “You know what’s interesting? Do you know who the best managers are? They are great individual contributors and they never want to be managers. But decide that they should be managers because no one else will do as good a job as they do.”
Steve Jobs said he changed the way he hired at Apple after hiring two professional managers from outside the company and firing them both.
‘Like a needle in a haystack; ‘the most important job is to hire’
According to a Fortune report citing an interview in the mid-1980s, Jobs said he was closely involved in the hiring process at Apple and wanted people who were “incredibly good at what they do” but were not “seasoned professionals.”
What was he looking for? Employees and managers who know what Apple can do with technology and want to bring it to “a lot of people.”
“The great thing that happens is when you create a core group of 10 great people, they start to self-police about who they let into that group, so I think the most important job for someone like me is recruiting,” he added.
In other speeches, Jobs also emphasized the need for visionary team leaders. “The best people are self-managed. Once they know what to do, they figure out how to do it. They don’t need to be managed at all. What they need is a shared vision,” he felt.
How to have such visionary leaders? In an interview with Forbes, Jobs said he was looking for smart people who would love Apple and want to do the best for the company. “If they fall in love with Apple, everything else will be fine. They’ll want to do what’s best for Apple, not what’s best for themselves or Steve or anyone else. That’s just finding the needles in the haystack,” he added.
