Steve Jobs on Hiring A Players: Build a self-policing team

I've noticed something in my life, which is the people that are really good never worry about things like that. The people that are really good want to work with the best people they can find, hopefully people that are even better than them. You know, I mean, that's my view of things. If you work with people that aren't as good as you, then, you know, you become a country of midgets. If you work with people that are better than you, then you really grow. The greatest people are self-managing. They don't need to be managed. If they know what to do, they'll go figure out how to do it, and they don't need to be managed at all. What they need is a common vision. We wanted people that were insanely great at what they did. When you get a core group of, uh, you know, 10 great—

people, it becomes self-policing as to who they let into that group. So I consider the most important job of someone, uh, like myself, is recruiting. It seems like all the good people I really want to hire, it seems to take me a year to hire them, and it's always been that way. Even at Apple, some of the best technical people or whoever, it always seemed to take me like a year to prime out of HP or wherever, and it took me over a year to hire. I think Mike has the award—you're about a year and a half, uh—and they're all worth it. Uh, what happens is I usually meet somebody that is really good, I think is very, very good and you can’t get them, and then you go try to find other people and nobody measures up. You know, when you meet somebody that good, just, you always

compare them to this one person, and you know you’re going to be settling for second best if you compromise. And I’ve always found it best not to compromise and just keep chipping away. So, so I think we’re doing quite a bit. Feels like we’re running the company a lot better now than we ever have. We’ve definitely made our share of mistakes. Um, you’ve got to be—you’ve got to be a really good talent scout because no matter how smart you are, uh, you need a team of great people, and you’ve got to figure out how to size people up fairly quickly, make decisions without knowing people too well and hire them, and, you know, see how you do and refine your intuition and be able to help

build an organization that can eventually just, you know, build itself. Um, because you need great people around you. Most things in life, the dynamic range between average and the best is at most 2 to 1, right? Like, if you go to New York City and you get an average taxi cab driver versus the best taxi cab driver, you know, you’re probably going to get to your destination with the best taxi cab maybe 30% faster. You know, in an automobile, what’s the difference between an average and the best? Maybe, I know, 20%. Uh, the best CD player and an average CD player, I don’t know, 20%. So two to one is a big, big dynamic range in most of life. Um, in software—and it used to be the

case in hardware too—the difference between average and the best is 50 to 1, maybe 100 to 1, easy. Okay? I’ve very few things in life that 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 never had a chance to do

that before and they don’t want to work with B and C players. And so 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, um, these were extraordinarily talented people. So, but there’re also people who now say that they don’t have the energy anymore to work for you. Mhm. Sure. Oh, I, I think if you talk to a lot of people on the Mac team they will tell you, um, 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. Yeah, they did. So, you know, it’s, uh, some of those things you are not sustainable for some people. What does it mean when you tell someone their work is, uh… It usually means their work is—sometimes it means, I think your work is, and I’m wrong, but, uh, uh, usually it means their work is not anywhere near good enough. We have

this great quote from Bill Atkinson who says when you say his or someone’s work is, you really mean “I don’t quite understand it. Would you please explain it to me?” No, that’s not usually what I meant. Uh, I, you know, when you get really good people, um, 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, um, their work isn't good enough and to do it very clearly and to articulate why, uh, 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 it's their work, 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, um, and I've always

taken a very direct approach. So, um, and I think if you talk to people that have worked with me, um, the really good people have found it beneficial. Uh, some people have hated it, you know, but, um, 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, uh, I had a very strong opinion and, uh, 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.