Steve Jobs on Hiring A Players: Building Great Teams

Your destination with the best taxi cab may be 30% faster. You know, in an automobile, what's the difference between an average and the best? Maybe, I don't know, 20%. The best CD player and an average CD player, I don't know, 20%. So two:one is a big, big dynamic range in most of life. In software, and it used to be the case in hardware too, the difference between average and the best is fifty:one, maybe 100 to one. Easy. Okay? I've very few things in life are like this. But what I was lucky enough to spend my life in is like this. And so I've built a lot of my success off finding these truly gifted people and not settling for B and C players, but really going for the A players.

And I found something. I found that when you get enough A players together, when you go through the incredible work to find, you know, five of these A players, they really like working with each other because they've had a chance to do that before. And they don't want to work with B and C players, so and it becomes self policing. And they only want to hire more A players. And so you build up these pockets of A players, and it propagates. And that's what the Mac team was like. They were all A players. And these were extraordinarily talented people. But there are also people who now say that they don't have the energy anymore to work for you. Sure.

Oh, I think if you talk to a lot of people on the MAC team, they will tell you, it was the hardest they've ever worked in their life. Some of them will tell you it was, you know, the happiest they've ever been in their life. But I think all of them will tell you that it is certainly one of the most intense and cherished experiences they will ever have in their life. Mhmm. Yeah. They do. So, you know, some of those things you you... Are not sustainable for some people. What what does it mean when you tell someone their work is shit? It usually means their work is shit. Sometimes it means I think your work is shit, and I...

I'm wrong. But, usually, it means their their work is not anywhere near good enough. We have this great quote from Bill Atkinson who says, when you say his... Beat someone's work is shit, you really mean, I don't quite understand it. Would you please explain it to me? No. That's not usually what I meant. I... You know, when you get really good people, they know they're really good, and you don't have to baby people's egos so much. And what really matters is the work. And everybody knows that. That's all that matters is the work. So it people are being counted on to do specific pieces of the puzzle.

And the most important thing I think you can do for somebody who's really good and who's really being counted on is to point out to them when, they're not their work isn't good enough, and to do it very clearly and to articulate why and to get them back on track. And you need to do that in a way that does not call into question your confidence in their abilities, but leaves not too much room for interpretation that the work that they have done for this particular thing is not good enough to support the goal of the team. And that's a hard thing to do. And I've always taken a very direct approach. So and I think if you talk to people that have worked with me, the really good people have found it beneficial.

Some people hated it, you know. But and I'm also one of these people that I I don't really care about being right, you know. I just care about success. So you'll find a lot of people that will tell you that, I had a very strong opinion, and, they, you know, presented evidence to the contrary. And five minutes later, I completely changed my mind because I'm like that. I don't mind being wrong. And I'll admit that I'm wrong a lot. It doesn't really matter to me too much. What matters to me is that we do the right thing. So how and why did Apple get into desktop publishing, which would become the Mac's killer app? I don't know if you know this, but we got the first Canon laser printer engine shipped in The United States at Apple.

And we had it hooked up to Elisa actually imaging pages before anybody, before HP, long before HP, long before Adobe. But I heard a few times people would tell me, hey, there's these guys over in this garage that left Xerox PARC. You ought to go see them. And I finally went and saw them, and, I saw what they were doing, and it was better than what we were doing. And they were going be a hardware company. They wanted to make printers and the whole thing. And so what I I talked them into being a software company. And we within two or three weeks, we had canceled our internal project. A bunch of people wanted to kill me over this, but we did it. And, I had cut a deal with Adobe to use their software, and we bought 19.9% of Adobe at Apple. They needed some financing.

We wanted a little bit of control. And, we were off to the races. And so we got the engines from Canon. We designed the first laser printer controller at Apple, and we got the software from Adobe, we introduced the LaserWriter. And no one at the company wanted to do it but a few of us in the Mac group. Everybody thought a $7,000 printer was crazy. What they didn't understand was you could share it with AppleTalk. I mean, they understood it intellectually, but they didn't understand it viscerally because the last really expensive thing we tried to sell was Lisa. So we pushed this thing through, and I had to basically do it over a few dead bodies. But we pushed this thing through, and it was the first laser printer on the market, as you know. And, you know, the rest is history. When I left Apple, Apple was the largest printer company measured by revenue in the world.

Wow. It lost that distinction, the Hewlett Packard, about three, four years after I left, unfortunately. But when I left, it was the largest printer company in the world. Did you envision desktop publishing? Was that a no brainer? You know, Yes. But we also envisioned really the networked office. And so in January 1995, when we had our annual meeting and introduced our new products, I made probably the largest marketing blunder of my career. 1985. 1985, sorry. Made probably the largest marketing blunder of my career by announcing the Macintosh Office instead of just desktop publishing.

And we had desktop publishing as a major component of that, but we announced a bunch of other stuff as well. And I think we should have just focused on desktop publishing at that time. After serious disagreements with Apple's CEO, John Scully, Steve left the company in 1985. Tell us about your departure from Apple. Oh, it was it was very painful. I'm not even sure I wanna talk about it. What can I say? I hired the wrong guy. That was Scully? Yeah. And he destroyed everything I'd spent ten years working for, starting with me, but that wasn't the saddest part.

I would have gladly left Apple if Apple would have turned out like I'd wanted it to. He basically got on a rocket ship that was about to leave the pad, and the rocket ship left the pad. And it kind of went to his head. He got confused and thought that he built the rocket ship. And then he kind of sort of changed their trajectory so that it was inevitably going to crash into the ground. Well, was always the pre Macintosh days and the early Macintosh days, it was always the Stephen John show. You know, you two were kind of joined at the hip for a while And then something happened to split you.

What was that? That's correct. What was that Well, what happened was that the industry went into a recession in late nineteen eighty four. Sales started seriously contracting. And John didn't know what to do. He had not a clue. And there was a leadership vacuum at the top of Apple. There were fairly strong general managers running the divisions. I was running the Macintosh division. Somebody else was running the Apple II division, etcetera. There were some problems with some of the divisions. There was a person running the storage division that was completely out to lunch, a bunch of things that needed to be changed. But all of those problems got put in a pressure cooker because of this contraction in the marketplace.

And there was no leadership. And John was in a situation where the board was not happy and where he was probably not long for the company. And one thing I did not ever see about John until that time was he had an incredible survival instinct. Somebody once told me this guy didn't get to be this, you know, the president of PepsiCo without these kinds of instincts. And, and it was true. And John decided that, a really good person to be the root of all these problems would be me. And so, we came to Loggerheads.

And, John cultivated a very close relationship with the Board, and they believed him. So that's what happened. So there were competing visions for the company. Oh, clearly. Well, not so much competing visions for the company because I think a vision for the company. Well, guess I'm asking what was your vision that It lost out in this wasn't an issue of vision. It was an issue of execution in the sense that, my belief was that Apple needed much stronger leadership, to sort of unite these various factions that we created with the divisions that the Macintosh was the future of Apple, that we needed to rein back expenses dramatically in the Apple II area, that we needed to be spending very heavily in the Macintosh area, things like that.

And John's vision was that he should remain the CEO of the company. And anything that would help him do that would be acceptable. So I think that, you know, Apple was in a state of paralysis in the early part of nineteen eighty five. And I wasn't at that time capable, I don't think, of running the company as a whole. You know, I was 30 years old, and I don't think I had enough experience to run a $2,000,000,000 company. Unfortunately, John didn't either. And so anyway, I was told in no uncertain terms that there was no job for me.

It was really, really tragic. Siberia. Yeah. It would have been far smarter for Apple to sort of, you know, let me work on the next day. I volunteered. Said, why don't I start a research division? And, you know, give me a few million bucks a year, and I'll go hire some really great people. We'll do the next great thing. And I was told there was no opportunity to do that. Oh, wow. So... And my office was taken away. It was it was... I mean, I'll get real emotional if we keep talking about this. So anyway, that that... But that's irrelevant. I'm just one person, and the company was a lot more people than me. So that... That's not the important part. The important part was the values of Apple, you know, over the next several years were systematically destroyed. I then asked Steve for his thoughts on the state of Apple.

Remember, this was 1995, a year before he would go back to Apple. Remember too that when Apple bought NeXT a year after this interview, Steve immediately sold the Apple stock he received as part of the sale. Apple's dying today. Apple's dying a very painful death. It's on a glide slope to to die. And, the reason is is because, you when I walked out the door at Apple, we had a ten year lead on everybody else in the industry. Macintosh was ten years ahead. We watched Microsoft take ten years to catch up with it. Well, the reason that they could catch up with it was because Apple stood still. I mean, the Macintosh that's shipping today is like 25% different than the day I left. They've spent hundreds of millions of dollars a year on R and D.

Mean, a total of probably $5,000,000,000 on R and D. What did they get for it? I don't know. But it was the what happened was understanding of how to move these things forward and how to create these new products somehow evaporated. And I think a lot of the good people stuck around for a while, but there wasn't an opportunity to get together and do this because there wasn't any leadership to do that. So what's happened with Apple now is that they've fallen behind in many respects, certainly in market share. And most importantly, their differentiation has been eroded by Microsoft.

And so what they have now is they have their installed base, which is not growing and which is shrinking slowly but will provide a good revenue stream for several years. But it's a glide slope that's just going to go like this. So it's unfortunate. And I don't really think it's reversible at this point in time. That's why. Well, what about Microsoft? I mean, that's the juggernaut now. Right. And it's, you know, and it's a kind of a, you know, Ford LTD going into the future. It's definitely not a Cadillac. It's not a BMW. It's just you know, what... What's going on there? How do those guys do that? Well, Microsoft's orbit was made possible by a Saturn V booster called IBM.

And I know Bill would get upset with me for saying this, but of course it was true. And much to Bill and Microsoft's credit, they used that fantastic opportunity to create more opportunity for themselves. Most people don't remember, but in '19 until 1984 with the Mac, Microsoft was not in the applications business. It was dominated by Lotus. And Microsoft took a big gamble to write for the Mac. And they came out with applications that were terrible. But they kept at it, and they made them better. And eventually, they dominated application market and then used a springboard of Windows to get into the PC market with those same applications. And now they dominate the applications in the PC space, too.

So they have two characteristics. I think they're very strong opportunists, and I don't mean that in a bad way. And two, they're like the Japanese. They just keep on coming. Now they were able to do that because of the revenue stream from the IBM nonetheless, they made the most of it, and I give them a lot of credit for that. The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And what that means is, I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their product. And and you say, well, why is that important?

Well, know, proportionally spaced fonts come from typesetting and beautiful books. That's where one gets the idea. If it weren't for the Mac, they would never have that in their products. And so I guess I am saddened not by Microsoft's success. I have no problem with their success. They've earned their success for the most part. I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third rate products. Their products have no spirit to them. Their products have no sort of spirit of enlightenment about them. They are very pedestrian. And the sad part is, is that most customers don't have a lot of that spirit either.

But it but the way that we're going to ratchet up our species is to take the best and to spread it around to everybody so that everybody grows up with better things and starts to understand the subtlety of these better things. And and Microsoft's just... You know, it's McDonald's. So, that's what saddens me. Not that Microsoft is one, but that, Microsoft's products don't display more more insight and more creativity. So what are you doing about it? Tell us about NeXT. Well, I'm not doing anything about it.

Okay. Because NeXT is too small of a company to do anything about that. I'm just watching it, and, there's there's really nothing I can do about it. Next, we talked about NeXT, the company Steve was running in 1995, which Apple was soon to buy. NeXT software would become the heart of the Mac in the form of OS 10.