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← Back to IdeasWould You Have Hired Steve Jobs?
It’s easy in retrospect to say that you would have hired the creative genius who imagined and drove the creation of the iPhone and iPad, transformed the music business with the iPod and animated movies with Pixar, and built Apple into the world’s most valuable company – with a market cap 40 percent larger than Exxon Mobil.
But would you have hired this scruffy college drop-out who looked like a hippie and smelled so bad that Atari had to assign him to the night shift to placate co-workers who complained he seldom showered or used a deodorant?
Maybe that’s not fair. All Steve Jobs had shown to get that first job was an early interest in technology, hardly qualifying among many young men. But the negatives went beyond body odor and dress. He was, says Walter Isaacson in his insightful biography of Jobs, “manipulative,” “brash,” “arrogant,” “abusive,” “temperamental,” “bratty,” “callous,” “meddling,” “insulting,” “disruptive,” “demoralizing,” and “antisocial.” Not infrequently, he told people they were “dumb shits.” In important meetings, he might put his bare feet on the desk. He was “a dreadful manager” who was not a great engineer and didn’t know much about technology.
You might have hesitated to take a chance, but Peter Drucker would have snapped him up. Jobs is textbook proof of the legendary management guru’s over-riding management principle:
Hire people for their strengths, not their absence of weaknesses.
Avoiding weakness, Drucker explained in The Effective Executive, will at best produce mediocrity. Jobs comes across in Isaacson’s biography as a man of towering weaknesses … and towering strengths.
Among his strengths: an unyielding passion for perfection, an uncanny ability to understand the needs and desires of consumers – before they knew them, and uncompromisingly high standards for people. He was a charismatic leader who inspired (and bullied) people to do more than they thought possible.
Jobs is one of a legion of great leaders who didn’t have conventional business credentials.
David Ogilvy wrote this memo to one of his senior executives in 1971:
Will Any Agency Hire This Man?
He is 38, and unemployed. He dropped out of college. He has been a cook, a salesman, a diplomatist and a farmer. He knows nothing about marketing, and he has never written any copy. He professes to be interested in advertising as a career (at the age of 38!) and is ready to go to work for $5,000 a year.
I doubt any American agency will hire him.
However, a London agency did hire him. Three years later he became the most famous copywriter in the world, and in due course built the tenth biggest agency in the world.
The moral: it sometimes pays an agency to be imaginative and unorthodox in hiring.
The Oxford drop-out went on to change advertising itself and make it more professional – placing brands and branding in the marketing vocabulary, injecting consumer research into the development of advertising, trumpeting the virtues of direct marketing (the spiritual parent of the internet), and preaching respect for the consumer. Ogilvy’s agency grew to become the third largest – and perhaps most respected.
Alan “Ace” Greenberg, a cigar-smoking, short-sleeved trader, is another successful leader with a disdain for conventional credentials. As Chairman of Bear Stearns, Greenberg helped transform the firm into one of the most profitable investment banks in the world (before it later imploded under his successors.) Known for his pungent and pointed memos to his Partners, Greenberg sent this one in 1981, on hiring PSDs:
There has been a lot of publicity lately about firms hiring students with MBA degrees. I think it is important that we continue a policy that has helped us prosper while growing from 700 people eight years ago to over 2,600 today.
Our first desire is to promote from within. If somebody with an MBA applies for a job, we will certainly not hold it against them, but we are really looking for people with PSD* degrees. They built this firm and there are plenty of them around because our competition seems to be restricting themselves to MBA’s.
If we are smart, we will end up with the future Cy Lewises, Gus Levys and Bunny Laskers [Bear Stearns leaders]. These men made their mark with a high school degree and a PSD.
*PSD stands for poor, smart and a deep desire to be rich.
So where do you find raw talent, without the benefit of conventional credentials?
When I met T. J. Rodgers, founder, president and CEO of Cypress Semiconductor in Silicon Valley, he had just come in from jogging. Still wearing shorts and carrying a mug of coffee, he expressed his strong view on where and how to find skilled engineering talent. Not via the Human Resources department, he said. Rodgers expects his executives to know the best people in their field and recruit them for Cypress.
The best people don’t necessarily graduate from the best schools. To check their hiring practices, Price Waterhouse (before it merged to become PricewaterhouseCoopers) did a study of where their top executives went to college. It was not the “A” schools as they classified them, but the B and C schools (although that didn’t change their hiring practices.)
Ron Daniel puts such a high value on recruiting that, when he was managing partner of McKinsey, he personally recruited on-campus 20 days a year. Not that he considered himself the best recruiter, he says, but because it sent a signal to the firm as to what is important.
I was fortunate to be hired by a brilliant and quirky curmudgeon, David P. Crane, who was willing to overlook my marginal credentials for the advertising agency business. I was 32, with 10 years of experience in corporate and industrial advertising in magazines, not consumer product advertising in television, where the action was. My only other predictive marker was as Editor-in-Chief of the undergraduate daily paper at Dartmouth College. I had never worked in an agency and didn’t have a MBA, like most of my peers. Clearly, eccentric hiring.
Crane assigned me to the General Foods account; GF was then the largest food product marketer in the U.S., and I managed to justify his confidence by eventually rising to CEO of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide. But that’s another story.
Agencies know the key to success is advertising that builds a client’s business; some try to get there by hiring a creative star, but the work doesn’t get better. The secret to getting great creative work is more than hiring the best copywriters, art directors or commercial producers – it is to create an environment in which everyone in the agency, in all departments, understands their job is to support and encourage great advertising.
I seldom interviewed people for the creative department, but I did interview many candidates for the account management group. Instead of just probing someone’s prior experience, I developed a series of pointed questions.
What was the last book you read? The last show or movie you saw? The last concert or art museum you visited? What magazines do you subscribe to?
These surprised some people, although my purpose was not to rattle them; I was looking for their “feel” for a creative product, as well as their intelligence and range of interests. How well would they work with the creative department, and how good would they be in working with the creative people?
There is no perfect formula for hiring,
Another key Drucker principle is concentration.
Effective executives do first things first and they do one thing at a time.
Jobs focused Apple on a handful of core products. When he became president on his return to the company he founded after having been pushed out, Jobs cut 70 percent of the models and products that had proliferated under his predecessor, including printers, servers, and the Newton PDA. In his Monday meetings, he would focus on two or three projects at a time.
Drucker counsels the right strategy over the popular one.
Choose your own direction – rather than climb on the bandwagon
When Microsoft Windows and Intel came to dominate the PC business, the “Wintel” model turned computers into commodities that competed principally on price. Commoditization was fueled in part by Moore’s Law, the observation of Intel’s Gordon Moore that that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 18 months. That phenomenon led to an economic mantra: to survive, companies had to take 20 percent out of costs every year … forever.
The embodiment of the counterculture, as Isaacson puts it, Jobs had no problem choosing his own direction. Instead of climbing on the bandwagon of commoditization, Jobs created the Macintosh computer as a proprietary system of hardware and software. Instead of open architecture compatible with other computers, the Mac was seamlessly integrated in its hardware, software and applications. Instead of computer or appliance stores, Apple stores provide a unique retail sales and support experience. Instead of focus groups to identify new product ideas, Jobs employed “leaps of imagination” to invent devices and services that consumers didn’t know they needed. Simple, elegant design further sets Apple products apart.
Another Drucker priority:
Aim high, aim for something that will make a difference
The target that Jobs set was “insanely great” products. The goal was not to beat competition, or to make money, but to “do the greatest thing possible.” Even the packaging, immediately discarded, had a high standard – the box for the Macintosh was redone 50 times. The passion for perfection was carried over into parts unseen, like the circuit board.
Jobs applied the same high standards to people, often demoralizing those who did not measure up. “Are you good enough to work on the Mac?” He was ruthless in building a team of what he called A players, bluntly saying that Apple can’t indulge B players. He surrounded himself with strong people and, by challenging them, made them better. It was said that he made people feel being part of original Mac project was an amazing mission
Where did he learn these management techniques? Certainly not from business school – he had barely started at Reed College before dropping out. Jobs didn’t study Peter Drucker, and he succeeded as a leader for reasons beyond Drucker.
He learned in part from his mistakes. It is a truism that people learn less from success than from their mistakes. After being ousted by Apple and Sculley, Jobs turned to the NeXT and the Pixar computers – “the real learning experience,” writes Isaacson. “Spectacular products that were dazzling market flops.” The Pixar computer was too expensive and didn’t run many programs. Time and money was wasted on a futuristic NeXT factory.
He was not reluctant to learn from others. Apple’s graphic user interface was appropriated from Xerox PARC.
And he learned from successful people. He learned design from Paul Rand and I.M. Pei, among others, and from studying the Bauhaus School. He studied premium retail marketing at Ralph Lauren’s lush Madison Avenue store in Manhattan. From Mickey Drexler and Gap, he learned how to control a product from manufacturing to how it is sold in stores.
Starting in his parents’ garage, Jobs went on to create a string of industry-changing products and two much-admired companies, Apple and Pixar. But what makes the story even more implausible is that this difficult creative genius, the “ultimate icon of inventiveness, imagination, and sustained innovation,” showed himself to be a world-class business leader as well.
The interesting question is whether Apple can prosper long-term without Jobs. One of his most visionary decisions may have been to launch the in-house Apple University, to institutionalize his style of decision making. Wouldn’t you hire a graduate of Apple University?
Jobs and Ogilvy present interesting parallels. They both dropped out of college and didn’t graduate. They both viewed their companies as their greatest achievements, and regarded training as essential to their enduring success. Jobs launched Apple University, to institutionalize his style of decision-making, Ogilvy copied McKinsey training programs for Ogilvy & Mather, which remains a respected leader – after his retirement and several management changes – with his name still on the door.