Steve Jobs hired the Macintosh team by showing candidates the prototype to see if they got genuinely excited. He avoided professional managers, calling most "bozos," and preferred top individual contributors who led reluctantly. Debbie Coleman, an English literature major, became the financial manager, showing Apple's bet on unconventional talent.
Chapters
The greatest people are self-managing. They don't need to be managed. If they know what— 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 not necessarily those seasoned professionals, but who had 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 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 interview agendas.
They would start at 9 or 10 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 before we—
And then they'd fill out an application.
No, they never filled out an application. That's the most 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 kind of were bored or said, "This is a nice computer," we didn't want them. 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. 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 knew how to manage, but they didn't know how to do anything. And so, if you're a great person, why do you want to work for somebody you can't learn anything from? You know what's interesting? You know who the best managers are? They're the great individual contributors who never ever want to be a manager but decide they have to be a manager because no one else is going to be able to do as good a job as them.
After hiring two professional managers from outside the company and firing them both, Jobs gambled on Debbie Coleman, a member of the Macintosh team, 32 years old, an English literature major with an MBA from Stanford. Debbie was a financial manager with no experience in manufacturing.
I mean, there's no way in the world anybody else would give me this chance to run this kind of operation, and I don't kid myself about that. This is an incredible high risk, both for myself personally and professionally, and for Apple as a company, to put a person like myself in this job. I mean, they're really betting on a lot of things. We're betting that my skills at organizational effectiveness to override all those lack of technology, lack of experience, lack of time in manufacturing. So it's a big risk, and I'm just an example, and every single person on the Mac team, almost to your entry-level person, you could say that about. This is a place where people were afforded just incredibly unique opportunities to prove that they could do, they could write the book again.
Inscribed inside the casing of every Macintosh, unseen by the consumer, are the signatures of the whole team. This is Apple's way of affirming that their latest innovation is a product of the individuals who created it, not the corporation.
