Photo by Quang Nguyen Vinh.
Hire smart people and get out of their way
Steve Jobs built a hell of a company, and far be it from us to say that he didn’t. He didn’t do it alone, and it’s clearer in the rear view mirror than it was at the time, and it seems pretty likely he was awful to a lot of people in the process. But the reality stands. Last month Apple became the first trillion dollar company in history. Market cap is an insidious and harmful way to keep score, but that remains a gob-smacking achievement.
So it’s easy to understand why people are ravenous for his advice. And while he’s said lots of things about management over the years, this is his most quoted line: Hire smart people and get out of their way.
There are a couple of problems with it, though. 1. He didn’t say it. 2. It’s terrible advice.
The line is a rewrite of something Lee Iacocca said, “I hire people brighter than me and then I get out of their way.” The thing that Steve said that’s closest is, “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.” Nevertheless, it’s become this automatic reflex now. When someone sneezes you say “gesundheit” without thinking about it. And when someone asks about management you say, “hiresmartpeopleandgetoutoftheirway.”
It’s terrible advice. Not because Steve (or Lee) didn’t mean it or feel it was key to their style of management. But because of what they didn’t say. They didn’t say that they had clear accountability with their directs that infused the organization. They didn’t say that they had their own sense of where the business was going and would not hesitate to use their authority when necessary. They didn’t mean unbridled autonomy. They meant autonomy within bounds that they set and were implicitly very willing to enforce.
When Steve famously gathered the mobileme launch team in an auditorium and said, “You’ve tarnished Apple’s reputation … You should hate each other for having let each other down” he wasn’t getting out of their way. When he fired the executive in charge of the project on the spot, he was very much in the way.
Autonomy is a good tool, but don’t make it your only one. By all means, empower your team. Give them room to explore. Encourage them to challenge ideas. But recognize that your job as a leader is to set expectations and hold accountability for those people, too. Being a buck stop means being thoughtfully, deliberately in the way sometimes.
— Melissa & Johnathan
What Melissa’s Chuckling About
I love nominative determinism (when people have last names that map to their occupations). As though all you need to do to figure out your profession is to check your surname. It’s a good reminder that sometimes the universe has a sense of humor. Check out Jean Couch in this piece from NPR. She’s talking about a topic near and dear to every desk worker’s heart. How to sit properly in chairs and uh…sofas.
What Johnathan’s Reading
The Price of Relevance is Fluency
Anil’s writing is succinct and clear, and he sets his own hook at least as well as I ever could:
“All of a sudden, the same things they’ve always said, or something said in private that suddenly becomes public, get a vociferous negative response unlike anything they’ve ever encountered. Usually, that blowback happens on social media, and these powerful legacy leaders tend to blame the issue on some ineffable negative essence of social networks. They rant about things like “the twitter mob”. But that’s not the issue at all.”
The price of relevance is fluency. This is worth the 4 minutes it takes to read it.
