Hiring the Best
Some excerpts and pills from interviews with Steve Jobs about investing in your talent pool.Even though many of these hints apply to corporate business and life in general, they are closely related to production business per se.
These words from Jobs also relate to common sense in general crewing practices and often forgotten in the mad rush to crew for a project.
As in the Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter -- By Liz Wiseman's and Greg Mckeown's
Wiseman and Mckeown frame five disciplines that help [productions] succeed. Multipliers:
1. Attract talented people and
deploy them at their highest point of contribution
2. Create an intense
environment that requires people's best thinking and work
3. Define an opportunity that
causes people to stretch
4. Drive sound decisions
through rigorous debate
5. Give people ownership of results and invest in their success
Why do smart people leave companies. Because they are smart and if the feel like they are not invested in or given opportunities... they move on.
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Steve
Jobs: Hiring the Best Is Your Most Important Task
Excerpts from In the Company of Giants: Candid Conversations with
the
Visionaries of the Digital World
In the
Company of Giants: Candid Conversations with the Visionaries
of the Digital World
by
Rama Dev Jager and Rafael Ortiz
Copyright 1997 by Rama Dev Jager and Rafael Ortiz
The
story of Steve Jobs is the story of a young college dropout
who sojourned to India in search of purity and enlightenment, returned
to
the U.S., and founded Apple Computer. Was dabbling with Hinduism the key
to success for a 20-year-old with little money and a modest technical
background?
Perhaps. High school buddy Steve Wozniak -- by all accounts a brilliant tinkerer and engineer -- and Jobs collaborated on several "projects" during their adolescence, including hacking into phone company networks and making video games. Yet, over time, their individual responsibilities remained well-defined: Wozniak mainly designed and built the product, and Jobs scrambled to find the customers, coworkers, and components. Eventually the projects became of value to others and Jobs persuaded Wozniak in 1976 to devote his energy to a partnership -- Apple Computer.
What talent do you think you consistently brought to Apple and
bring
to NeXT and Pixar?
I think that I've consistently figured out who really smart people were
to hang around with. No major work that I have been involved with has
been
work that can be done by a single person or two people, or even three or
four people. Some people can do one thing magnificently, like
Michelangelo,
and others make things like semiconductors or build 747 airplanes --
that
type of work requires legions of people. In order to do things well,
that
can't be done by one person, you must find extraordinary people.
The key observation is that, in most things in life, the dynamic range between average quality and the best quality is, at most, two-to-one. For example, if you were in New York and compared the best taxi to an average taxi, you might get there 20 percent faster. In terms of computers, the best PC is perhaps 30 percent better than the average PC. There is not that much difference in magnitude. Rarely you find a difference of two-to-one. Pick anything.
But, in the field that I was interested in -- originally, hardware design -- I noticed that the dynamic range between what an average person could accomplish and what the best person could accomplish was 50 or 100 to 1. Given that, you're well advised to go after the cream of the cream. That's what we've done. You can then build a team that pursues the A+ players. A small team of A+ players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players. That's what I've tried to do.
So you think your talent is in recruiting?
It's not just recruiting. After recruiting, it's building an environment
that makes people feel they are surrounded by equally talented people
and
their work is bigger than they are. The feeling that the work will have
tremendous influence and is part of a strong, clear vision -- all those
things. Recruiting usually requires more than you alone can do, so I've
found that collaborative recruiting and having a culture that recruits
the A players is the best way. Any interviewee will speak with at least
a dozen people in several areas of this company, not just those in the
area that he would work in. That way a lot of your A employees get broad
exposure to the company, and -- by having a company culture that
supports them if they feel strongly enough -- the current employees can
veto a candidate.
That seems very time-consuming.
Yes, it is. We've interviewed people where nine out of ten employees
thought the candidate was terrific, one employee really had a problem
with
the candidate, and therefore we didn't hire him. The process is very
hard,
very time-consuming, and can lead to real problems if not managed
right. But it's a very good way, all in all.
Yet, in a typical startup, a manager may not always have the
time
to spend recruiting other people.
I disagree totally. I think it's the most important job. Assume you're
by yourself in a startup and you want a partner. You'd take a lot of
time
finding the partner, right? He would be half of your company. Why should
you take any less time finding a third of your company or a fourth of
your
company or a fifth of your company? When you're in a startup, the first
ten people will determine whether the company succeeds or not. Each is
10 percent of the company. So why wouldn't you take as much time as
necessary
to find all the A players? If three were not so great, why would you
want
a company where 30 percent of your people are not so great? A small
company depends on great people much more than a big company does.
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1. Do what you love to do. Find your true passion. Do what you love to do a make a difference! The only way to do great work is to love what you do.2. Be different. Think different. "Better be a pirate than to join the navy."
2. Do your best. Do your best at every job. No sleep! Success generates more success. So be hungry for it. Hire good people with passion for excellence.
3. Make Strengths – Weaknesses – Opportunities – Threats analysis. As soon as you join/start a company, make a list of strengths and weaknesses of yourself and your company on a piece of paper. Don't hesitate in throwing bad apples out of the company.
4. Be entrepreneurial. Look for the next big thing. Find a set of ideas that need to be quickly and decisively acted upon and jump through that window. Sometimes the first step is the hardest one. Just take it! Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.
6. Start small, think big. Don't worry about too many things at once. Take a handful of simple things to begin with, and then progress to more complex ones. Think about not just tomorrow, but the future. "I want to put a ding in the universe,” reveal Steve Jobs his dream.
7. Strive to become a market leader. Own and control the primary technology in everything you do. If there's a better technology available, use it no matter if anyone else is not using it. Be the first, and make it an industry standard.
8. Focus on the outcome. People judge you by your performance, so focus on the outcome. Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected. Advertise. If they don't know it, they won't buy your product. Pay attention to design. "We made the buttons on the screen look so good you'll want to lick them." "Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."
9. Ask for feedback. Ask for feedback from people with diverse backgrounds. Each one will tell you one useful thing. If you're at the top of the chain, sometimes people won't give you honest feedback because they're afraid. In this case, disguise yourself, or get feedback from other sources. Focus on those who will use your product – listen to your customers first.
10. Innovate. Innovation distinguishes a leader from a follower. Delegate, let other top executives do 50% of your routine work to be able to spend 50% your time on the new stuff. Say no to 1,000 things to make sure you don't get on the wrong track or try to do too much. Concentrate on really important creations and radical innovation. Hire people who want to make the best things in the world. You need a very product-oriented culture, even in a technology company. Lots of companies have tons of great engineers and smart people. But ultimately, there needs to be some gravitational force that pulls it all together.
11. Learn from failures. Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.
12. Learn continually. There's always "one more thing" to learn! Cross-pollinate ideas with others both within and outside your company. Learn from customers, competitors and partners. If you partner with someone whom you don't like, learn to like them – praise them and benefit from them. Learn to criticize your enemies openly, but honestly.
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The Seed of Apple's Innovation
Bloomerg Businessweek
A: You need a very product-oriented culture, even in a technology company. Lots of companies have tons of great engineers and smart people. But ultimately, there needs to be some gravitational force that pulls it all together. Otherwise, you can get great pieces of technology all floating around the universe. But it doesn't add up to much. That's what was missing at Apple for a while. There were bits and pieces of interesting things floating around, but not that gravitational pull.
People always ask me why did Apple really fail for those years, and it's easy to blame it on certain people or personalities. Certainly, there was some of that. But there's a far more insightful way to think about it. Apple had a monopoly on the graphical user interface for almost 10 years. That's a long time. And how are monopolies lost? Think about it. Some very good product people invent some very good products, and the company achieves a monopoly.
But after that, the product people aren't the ones that drive the company forward anymore. It's the marketing guys or the ones who expand the business into Latin America or whatever. Because what's the point of focusing on making the product even better when the only company you can take business from is yourself?
So a different group of people start to move up. And who usually ends up running the show? The sales guy. John Akers at IBM is the consummate example. Then one day, the monopoly expires for whatever reason. But by then the best product people have left, or they're no longer listened to. And so the company goes through this tumultuous time, and it either survives or it doesn't.
Q: Is this common in the industry?
A: Look at Microsoft -- who's running Microsoft?
Q: Steve Ballmer.
A: Right, the sales guy. Case closed. And that's what happened at Apple, as well.
Q: How did Apple recapture its innovative spark?
A: I used to be the youngest guy in every meeting I was in, and now I'm usually the oldest. And the older I get, the more I'm convinced that motives make so much difference. HP's primary goal was to make great products. And our primary goal here is to make the world's best PCs -- not to be the biggest or the richest.
We have a second goal, which is to always make a profit -- both to make some money but also so we can keep making those great products. For a time, those goals got flipped at Apple, and that subtle change made all the difference. When I got back, we had to make it a product company again.
