Steve Jobs on Management: Run by Ideas, Not Hierarchy
This clip is an excerpt from a longer recording: Steve Jobs on Macintosh: Building a Better Way.
What Jobs talks about
Jobs describes Apple as a deeply collaborative company organized like a startup, with no committees and clear ownership across major functions. He says the company meets weekly as a top team to stay aligned and turn ideas into products.
He argues that effective leadership comes from a shared vision, not hierarchy. In his view, great people should be trusted to make decisions, because the best ideas should win and good people will leave if they are merely managed.
Jobs also explains how Apple hired by energy and conviction, not just experience. He says the company looked for people whose eyes lit up when they saw the Macintosh prototype and who wanted to make something that would matter.
An interviewer asks questions; Jobs answers throughout.
In his words
“No committees.”
“We're the biggest startup on the planet.”
“You have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy.”
“They don't need to be managed at all.”
“What leadership is is having a vision”
Key points
- Apple was organized like a startup, with no committees.
- Top leaders met weekly to coordinate the whole business.
- Teamwork depends on trust and on dividing work into strong teams.
- People should be run by ideas, not hierarchy.
- Great employees need a common vision, not micromanagement.
- Hiring focused on passion, taste, and excitement about the product.
- The best managers are often people who never wanted to be managers.
Full transcript
One of the keys to Apple is Apple's an incredibly collaborative company. And so you know how many committees we have at Apple? No. Zero. We have no committees. No committees. We are a very we are organized like a startup. One person's in charge of iPhone OS software. One person is in charge of Mac hardware. One person is in charge of iPhone hardware engineering. Another person is in charge of worldwide marketing. Another person is in charge of operations. It's... We're organized like a startup. We're the biggest startup on the planet. And we all meet for three hours once a week, and we talk about everything we're doing, the whole business.
And there's tremendous teamwork at the top of the company, which filters down to tremendous teamwork throughout the company. And teamwork is dependent on trusting the other folks to come through with their part without watching them all the time, but trusting that they're going to come through with their parts. And that's what we do really well. And we're great at figuring out how to divide things up into these great teams that we have and all work on the same thing, touch bases frequently, and bring it all together into a product. We do that really well. And so what I do all day is meet with teams of people and work on ideas and solve problems to make new products, to make new marketing programs, whatever it is.
And are people willing to tell you you're wrong? Yeah. I mean, other than snarky journalists. I mean, people have No. Worked We have wonderful arguments. And do you win them all? Or... Oh, no. I wish I did. No. See, you can't. If you wanna hire great people and have them stay working for you, you have to let them make a lot of decisions, and you have to you have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy. The best ideas have to win. So... Otherwise, good people don't stay. But you must be more than a facilitator who runs meetings. You obviously contribute your own ideas. I contribute ideas. Sure. Well, I... Why would I be there if I didn't? It is people are self managing.
They don't need to be managed. You... If they know what... If... Once they know what to do, they'll go figure out how to do it. They don't need to be managed at all. What they need is a common vision. And that's what leadership is. What leadership is is having a vision, being able to articulate that so the people around you can understand it, and getting a consensus on a common vision. We wanted people that were insanely great at what they did, but were were not necessarily those seasoned professionals, but who had on... At the tips of their fingers and in their passion, the latest understanding of where technology was and what we could do with that technology, and who wanted to bring that to to lots of people. So the neatest thing that happens is when you get a core group of, you know, 10 great people, that it becomes self policing as to who they let into that group.
So I consider the most important job of someone like myself is recruiting. We agonized over hiring. We had interviews. I could go back and look at some of the interviews' agendas. They would start at nine or ten in the morning and go through dinner. A new interviewee would talk to everybody in the building at least once, maybe a couple times, and then come back for another round of interviews, and then we'd all get together and talk about it. And then they fill out an application. Application. No. They never filled out.... Critical part of the interview. At least to my mind was when we finally decided we liked them enough to show them the Macintosh prototype, and then we sat them down in front of it. And if they just kinda were bored or said, this is a nice computer. We didn't want it. We we wanted their eyes to light up and them to get really excited, and then we knew they were one of us. And everybody just wanted to work, not because it was work that had to be done, but it was because something that we really believed in that was just gonna really make a difference.
And that's what kept the whole thing going. We all wanted exactly the same thing. And instead of spending our time arguing about what the computer should be, we all knew what the computer should be, and we just went and did it. We went through that stage in Apple where we went out and we thought, oh, we're gonna be a big company. Let's hire professional management. We went out and hired a bunch of professional management. It didn't work at all. Most of them were bozos. They they knew how to manage, but they didn't know how to do anything. And so if you're a great person, why do you wanna work for somebody you can't learn anything from? And you know what's interesting? You know who the best managers are? They're the great individual contributors who never ever wanna be a manager, but decide they have to be a manager because all... Every... No one else is gonna be able to do as good a job as
Transcribed from the audio by speech recognition (Deepgram). Timestamps link to the video above. Errors are possible.