Getting People Who “Get It”
You show up for a job interview. It’s a management position, but not a high-level one. While you’re waiting, someone drops down in the chair beside you. “Are you here about a job?” he asks. You look over and are startled to see the legendary head of the company. As you sit there, speechless, barely managing to nod, he asks you about one of the more challenging issues facing the industry. You force yourself to focus and quickly relay some thoughts on the subject. He asks you to elaborate, so you lay out your thinking in detail. He spots the weak points in your argument, and you acknowledge them, but explain why you are taking the position you described anyway.
As the conversation builds, you become so caught up in the subject that you almost forget whom you’re talking to. Every so often, the discussion veers off in some unlikely direction as he asks you a question about something barely connected to what you were saying—your personal tastes, your teenage years, your hobbies—but then he steers the conversation back to the subject at hand. You constantly feel off balance, but he seems so interested in everything you’re saying that you can’t help but enjoy the back-and-forth. Without warning, the living legend gets up. “I’ve got to run. When the human-resources people call you in, tell them I’ve just hired you.”
Pretty strange, isn’t it? The leader in this scenario didn’t look at your résumé or other records. He didn’t want to know about your most recent position or qualifications. He didn’t ask what sort of job you were looking for or your salary requirements. He didn’t say what he was hiring you to do. He only seemed interested in your thoughts about an issue that currently concerned him. The few other questions he asked appeared... completely random.
How can such a hiring process possibly work? It goes against everything corporate recruiters know and do. Senior business leaders aren’t supposed to waste their time hiring lower-level personnel. Vetting potential hires is a routine, tedious, and time-consuming process. It doesn’t require the unique skills of an industry legend. Besides, human-resources experts have made hiring into something of a science. They have reliable tests and techniques for sorting and testing applicants, analyzing employment histories and work experience, and evaluating personalities and work styles. Everything they do is systematic, and their procedures serve to take the guesswork out of hiring. In modern human-resources management, there is no need for personal, intuitive judgments.
Or is there? Ask a superboss, and you’ll get an earful to the contrary. Superbosses might favor people with advanced degrees and other formal credentials. They might employ some of the tests and psychological evaluations popular among human-resources specialists. At the same time, they complement those rote tools with a more creative style of talent spotting. The idea of looking for recruits who were already doing exactly the same kind of job and who will be kept indefinitely in that job would probably never occur to a superboss. In fact, if a prospective recruit has any quality that would fit neatly into a traditional hiring criterion, it’s almost guaranteed that a superboss will pay little attention to that benchmark. When it comes to hiring, superbosses make their own rules. They forge their own path. They sniff out promising employees in the craziest of places. And the people they get are unlike any other: engaged, brilliant, creative—the raw material that may well be the stuff of future superstars.
Making Lunch for a Legend
It’s July 1993. The setting is the brightly lit kitchen of a fine dining establishment in the San Francisco Bay area. The kitchen is largely deserted because the restaurant is closed on Sundays. Standing over an industrial stainless-steel stove, a tall, slender woman with a long brown ponytail is hard at work preparing a meal. Steam rises from a sizzling saucepan; from a corner, the sweet scent of caramelizing fruit starts to waft through the kitchen. Sweat dots the woman’s forehead. She’s been here since five in the morning, washing ingredients, chopping, slicing, and precooking sauces.
Nearby, a party of older women and men are seated at a table, watching the woman work while savoring their first course, rabbit cappelletti in brodo. Periodically they sip their glasses of perfectly chilled Mâcon-Villages from France. Their table has been set for formal service—cloth napkins, perfectly spaced silverware, freshly cut flowers. These guests are a jovial bunch, enjoying a casual conversation. As the woman finishes the second course, grilled swordfish and summer squashes with salsa verde, she looks up from the stove to describe the ingredients selected and the cooking techniques used. Her customers hang on her words and study every turn of her tongs, every flick of the saucepan. They don’t quite know it yet, but after these dishes they will be treated to a dessert of pear galette with Gorgonzola.
You might think this is the ultimate foodie experience, prepared for a group of VIP guests by a celebrity chef. But these aren’t just any VIP guests. And the objective of the woman cooking isn’t to delight them enough so they’ll come back. In fact, she isn’t even a chef in this kitchen, nor is she even one of the midlevel cooks who work at the restaurant. For weeks now, she’s been laboring without pay on a trial basis in an effort to become one of those cooks. She did well enough, apparently, because as a final test she has been invited to prepare the most important lunch of her career to date.
Melissa Kelly remembers preparing lunch at the famed Chez Panisse as a “daunting task.”1 The guest of honor was Alice Waters, the restaurant’s owner and godmother. Others at the table included Stephen Singer, the wine steward (and father of Alice’s daughter, Fanny); Lindsey Shere, the pastry chef; Gilbert Pilgram (now owner of Zuni in San Francisco) and Peggy Smith (subsequently cofounder of Cowgirl Creamery), the upstairs café chefs; and Jean-Pierre Moullé and Catherine Brandel, the chefs of the high-end downstairs kitchen. These were some of the biggest names in the American restaurant scene, and all had taken time out of their busy schedules to taste Melissa’s original creations. It was a dream come true for Kelly—and intimidating as hell. If Kelly passed the test, she would receive confirmation that she was good enough to work with the best of the best, as well as the chance to hone her craft at the feet of a legendary food innovator.
Kelly was no newbie. She had graduated from the Culinary Institute of America and had worked in restaurants in West Virginia, New York, and Miami before moving to California.2 In New York, she had held several senior positions working for acclaimed chef Larry Forgione. Still, as she recalls, she was nervous—really nervous. Kelly had been asked to write a menu, shop for ingredients, select the wine, set the table, prepare the meal, and serve it—all by herself. As she cooked and served each course, she was expected to speak intelligently about what she was doing. Upon completion of the meal, she would sit with Waters and her team to receive a frank evaluation. Each guest, one by one, would offer his or her critique of Kelly’s efforts. “I had a good amount of culinary experience, although I felt like a little peon in that room compared to those people. It was a great experience. It was very self-revealing for me.”3
Determined to impress Waters, Kelly had begun working on the lunch days in advance, writing out menu ideas and foraging in the markets for the choicest ingredients. In the end, the effort was worth it. Kelly went on to work at Chez Panisse for six enriching, high-octane months before receiving an attractive offer at a restaurant on the East Coast. Given the success she’s known since her time at Chez Panisse, Kelly clearly benefitted from her brush with a superboss (and, yes, even just a brush with a superboss can pay great dividends, thanks to the intensity of the experience). In 1999, she won the James Beard Award for best regional chef in the Northeast. Afterward, she opened highly regarded restaurants of her own in Maine, Florida, and Arizona, all called Primo and all emphasizing fresh, local, farm-to-table cooking. In 2013, she won a second James Beard Award, the first chef ever to win the Best Chef, Northeast Award twice.4 Today, she looks back at Chez Panisse as a turning point in her career, the experience that allowed her to come into her own as a chef: “I didn’t have a style when I got there,” she writes on the Primo website. “By the time I left, I did—simplicity, seasonality, freshness.”5 Of her own restaurants she has said, “I feel like I’m passing the torch from Chez Panisse.”6
That Special Something
It’s clear that Kelly had that “special something” every superboss seeks. It’s also clear that Waters had a nose (or, perhaps in her case, a palate) for sniffing out that “it” factor. In any industry, superbosses seek out unusual qualities most bosses don’t even think about. Superbosses don’t want just the candidates whose skills enabled them to score high on some test; they want candidates whose abilities are so special, no one would think to test them. If a candidate seems to have what the superboss is after, he won’t hesitate to overrule human-resources specialists. The superboss’s quest for superstars will override everything else.
This emphasis on unusual talent is far more extraordinary than it might seem. Nearly all business executives, especially those in human resources, will tell you that they want recruits who are very talented, smart, good at leading, and impressive all around. This is different from what superbosses want. Superbosses don’t want recruits who are very talented and smart; they want recruits who are unusually talented and startlingly smart. They don’t want ordinary leaders; they want drivers of change. They don’t want most-likely-to-succeed types; they want people who are prepared to transform the very definition of success.
That special something they seek is ultimately quite hard to capture in words. After a technical discussion, Larry Ellison would base his decision to hire someone for a project on his judgment that the person “got it.” Gene Roberts based his most important hiring decision—his choice of managing editor—on his intuitive sense that the candidate “had what the job needed.”7 Ralph Lauren made a runway model the head of women’s design “for no other reason than she seemed to get it—she got the clothes.”8 Most superbosses base their choice for key associates on how well they “get” what the superboss is trying to do.
So what does “getting it” mean? One thing that virtually all superbosses look for is unusual intelligence. Norman Brinker believed that the most important part of running a restaurant chain was hiring the smartest people possible. Ralph Lauren looked for a kind of “fashion intelligence.” He wanted everyone who worked for him, even in the most menial roles, to have a fashion sense and be able to say interesting things about clothes. Lorne Michaels has a rule that he repeats all the time: “If you look around the room and you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room. You know, if you look around the room and you think, ‘God, these people are amazing,’ then you’re probably in the right room.”9 Virtually all superbosses place an emphasis on having everyone around them be as smart as possible, and they suss this out through their nonconventional interview techniques and by observing them closely during on-the-job trial periods.
A second component of “getting it” is creativity. Superbosses are not looking for employees who think the same way they do. They are looking for employees who, like them, can tackle problems originally and differently. Even more, superbosses are looking for employees who can actually get somewhere with an original line of thought, who can creatively apply what they know. When superbosses talk with prospective employees, they want, more than anything else, to hear how they think. This is why superbosses as diverse as Norman Brinker, Larry Ellison, and Roger Corman were known to listen intensely when talking with job candidates, expecting to learn something new themselves.
When former employees describe the hiring practices of superbosses, the emphasis on creativity may take many forms, but it is often overt. Lee Clow, one of advertising mogul Jay Chiat’s closest associates, emphasized that Chiat “didn’t hire off the conventional portfolio/resume—he looked for people who did things creatively.” Clow, the cocreator of the famous “1984” ad that introduced Apple’s Macintosh computer during the Super Bowl XVIII telecast, was himself an illustration of this principle. He landed his job with Chiat’s firm by carrying out an eccentric yet highly creative ad campaign devoted entirely to the proposition that Chiat should hire him. He created slogans and designs, had bumper stickers and T-shirts made, used mailings and phone calls, and kept bombarding Chiat’s firm with his message until they put him on the payroll. It wouldn’t have worked if the ad campaign hadn’t also demonstrated considerable quality. But the real differentiator was the emphasis on creativity.10
A third component of “getting it” is extreme flexibility. Although superbosses often hire people with special areas of expertise, they are not usually interested in specialists who can only do one thing. They want a kind of brilliance that can be applied to many sorts of problems. Norman Brinker thought that talented people should be able to handle any position. One of his associates used a sports metaphor to describe his attitude: “Norman wasn’t a fan of hiring people to play first base, for example; he just wanted to hire a good baseball player.”11 Although Gene Roberts helped employees build expertise in specific niches, he believed that every reporter and columnist who worked for him should be able to cover any breaking news story, regardless of the subject.
To underscore their appreciation for flexibility, superbosses frequently assign new hires jobs that have little to do with their previous experience and qualifications. Bill Sanders would regularly move people to different jobs in different parts of his company. Gene Roberts was known to take someone who had been processing comic strips and make him a feature writer, or to assign a sportswriter to cover politics. Roger Corman regularly filled the positions needed for film productions with people he had hired for completely different jobs. Jack Nicholson, for example, worked for Corman as a writer and as a director.
The determination of superbosses to recruit the most intelligent, creative, and flexible employees possible may seem startling. Like many superbosses, real estate guru Bill Sanders believed that “if you are going to hire someone, make sure they are great; otherwise don’t hire anybody.”12 Ellison had recruiters ask prospective candidates: “Are you the smartest person you know?” If they answered, “Yes,” they were likely to be given a further interview. If they answered, “No,” they were asked, “Who is?” Then they were dropped from the hiring process and Ellison’s recruiters would contact the person who was named as smarter.13
Getting People Who “Get It”
It isn’t easy for superbosses to recruit the kind of people they are looking for. To pull it off, they frequently must be willing to take a chance on unconventional backgrounds and qualifications. The first chef Waters hired for Chez Panisse was a graduate student in philosophy who had no culinary training at all. Despite the lack of experience, the audition meal she cooked and her conversations with Waters were enough to convince Waters that she “got it.” Corman was willing to hire actors with no acting experience, directors with no directing experience, and production designers with no production design experience. Walsh hired someone for his NFL coaching staff who had done little more than coach high school football.
Somewhat surprisingly, superbosses in technology-based industries—where employees must meet exacting standards—are just as fond of recruiting employees with unconventional qualifications as superbosses in more creative industries. Larry Ellison was happy to hire someone who had dropped out of college, as he himself had done; he didn’t need someone with multiple advanced degrees. In fact, in at least one case, he preferred a candidate who had dropped out of college shortly before graduation because he thought it showed an independence that was commendable.14 Formal qualifications never mattered as much as other signs of talent. Ellison would pay special attention to anything a candidate had done that seemed genuinely difficult, regardless of what it was. “When we’re hiring,” Ellison said, “we look for people with a strong aptitude in mathematics and physics and music (which is very highly correlated to mathematics), but who can also make judgments as to where they’re going to invest their time.”15 If recruits were gifted enough, Ellison believed, they would rise to the technical challenges.
Many superbosses make a special effort to extend their search for new employees into groups that other companies have overlooked. Bill Walsh started an internship program in the NFL for minority coaches, allowing participants a fast track into the NFL and himself a chance to tap into a vast new source of talent. Jay Chiat was one of the first in advertising to regularly hire women and minorities to creative positions. This was not because he was trying to achieve greater social justice but because he saw these groups as a new pool of potential all-stars.
Superbosses also tend to be extremely opportunistic in their hiring. Constantly searching for outstanding new blood, they will jump at the chance to scoop it up whenever and in whatever form they find it. There are many stories of superbosses setting out to recruit one sort of employee and returning with a completely different one. Bill Walsh went to Kansas to check out a promising quarterback, but his attention was drawn to the quarterback’s roommate, who was catching passes as the quarterback demonstrated his throw. Walsh said no to the quarterback and drafted the roommate instead, even though Walsh’s own scouts thought it was a bad idea. That receiver was Dwight Clark, who became a 49ers legend.16
To further tease out people with extreme ability, superbosses regularly employ interview methods that other executives would regard as highly eccentric. Ralph Lauren would often decide whether to hire designers without even looking at their portfolios. Gene Roberts and Lorne Michaels would fall silent for long stretches of time during interviews, causing the interviewees to say revealing things in an effort to fill the silence. Corman often relied on interviews for his films when other producers would have auditions. One of the techniques he used in these interviews was to ask the candidate for an opinion about some scene in a film and then start an argument about it.
Some interview techniques were so unorthodox that they bordered on observational research methods employed by ethnographers. When Miles Davis became interested in Herbie Hancock, he invited him over, led him to his basement, introduced him to two other musicians, suggested they try playing together, and then left. He repeated this routine for two or three more days. While Hancock and the others played, Davis listened to their sound over his home intercom. When he felt that he had heard enough, he went down, played a few numbers with them himself, and told Hancock that he was hiring him as his new pianist.17 Or consider the tradition of “Super Saturdays” developed by real estate mogul Bill Sanders. He would bring thirty finalists for jobs—often MBAs—to Santa Fe, New Mexico, for morning interviews, followed by a long hike at Sanders’s ranch in the hills outside the city. Constance Moore, the former managing director at Security Capital Group under Sanders, remembers that Sanders and others in the company would “take these kids to seven thousand feet and talk with them. They were generally exhausted at the end of the day. We learned a whole lot about them on these hikes, so then afterward, we would all sit down and talk about each one of them and figure out which ones we wanted to ask to join.”18
Superbosses are also interested in how candidates react to unexpected questions they couldn’t possibly have prepared for. When candidates would walk into an interview with Jay Chiat, sympathetic managers used to warn them to “expect something weird or out of left field to see if he can shock you.”19 Alice Waters often began job interviews by asking candidates what books they had read recently as a way to get them to talk about subjects they wouldn’t have thought relevant to working in a restaurant. Ellison simply asked candidates about whatever he was currently interested in.
Once a superboss thinks he has found someone with that “special something,” he takes dramatic steps to follow through. Often, Bill Sanders would personally call candidates who interested him the instant they came to his attention—late at night, on Christmas, whenever he heard about them. Gene Roberts once authorized his chief recruiter to deliver a baby-blue Mustang as a gift to a columnist he wanted to hire. When she nonetheless turned down his job offer, he thought it only fair to let her keep the car.20 John Tucker, Kraft’s head of human resources, recalled that Kraft under Michael Miles wanted to hire Jim Kilts (later CEO of Gillette) so badly that they even took to calling Kilts’s wife every few months to try to get her on board.21 For superbosses, recruiting all-star employees is such a high priority that it justifies almost any amount of time and trouble.
The Power of Feeling Unthreatened
Despite claiming to be interested in hiring the best people, most managers aren’t actually comfortable with the very best. They don’t feel at ease directing employees who understand the task at hand and what it requires better than they do. They worry that employees who are too gifted will make contributions that outshine theirs. They have no idea what to do with proposals from subordinates that are too original and unexpected. They may even fear being replaced by those whom they have hired and promoted. As a consequence, most managers will unconsciously choose second-tier talent, because it is easier to categorize and deal with. They usually don’t admit this to themselves, but they describe second-tier employees as first-class talent and write off first-class prospects as oddballs.
The imperious, ego-driven Bossy Boss types are extreme examples of this tendency. The last thing such bosses are able to tolerate is anyone whose skills or aptitudes might rival their own. Donald Trump, at least as seen on TV, is able to seem big only by surrounding himself with people who seem small. If someone does anything genuinely impressive in his presence, he needs to belittle it. When someone shows sparks of real creativity, he treats them as a misfit. Working on a regular basis with anyone who may upstage him seems to be more than he can bear.
Superbosses (a group that does not include Trump) have none of these problems. They are self-confident enough to feel completely unthreatened by extreme intelligence, mind-bending creativity, and forceful personalities. They are arrogant enough to be completely oblivious to the possibility of being outshone. They have no problem with subordinates who are better than they are, perhaps because they don’t entirely believe anyone is better than they are. There’s a famous joke about Larry Ellison: “What’s the difference between God and Larry Ellison? God knows he isn’t Larry Ellison.” A similar joke could be told about almost any superboss, despite the fact that some of them are deceptively mild-mannered. They all feel supremely effective and completely comfortable in their respective domains. Their status is not founded on any outward trappings. So strong is their personal sense of self that they can never be seriously unsettled by any level of ability, no matter how remarkable. In fact, they enjoy being challenged by new employees, especially if the challenge is founded on a genuine insight. If someone working for them can provide them with an opportunity to improve their understanding, do better, or come up with a better solution, they usually find it irresistible.
John Griffin, who was second in command to hedge-fund legend Julian Robertson at Tiger Management before leaving to run his own fund at Blue Ridge Capital, recalls that his superboss was so eager for new ideas that he was like a “Venus flytrap saying ‘Feed me!’”22 Robertson delighted in hiring people who “saw things in often free, new, and different ways,” people who “didn’t worry about tilting the windmill.”23 Larry Ellison was likewise especially proud of employees he described as “driven by a drummer only they can hear.” His reason was that “they will constantly question my wisdom, and won’t be the least bit shy about challenging me, and I hope they’ll keep me from making mistakes.”24 Despite falling out with some Oracle executives who questioned his judgments, Ellison seemed to relish the sort of interaction that was possible only when people were willing to argue with him. Superbosses appreciate unusual talent, not just because of the benefits that talent can bring to their company but also because they enjoy the energy boost unusual talent can provide.
Most superbosses make sure that their comfort around other supremely skilled people is publicly known. This is partly because they are proud of it, but even more so because they want the most capable people available to seek them out. Norman Brinker was constantly and explicitly on the lookout for executives who knew far more about something than he did. Bill Sanders liked to talk about “how many people I have hired that were four times smarter than I was.”25 When superbosses see their employees shine, they feel it reflects positively on them as leaders. If their employees gain a public reputation for brilliance, then it will be easier to recruit more employees like them.
Room for Others to Shine
The extreme self-confidence of superbosses means that there is always room for other stars around them. They feel that collaborating with outrageously capable individuals is only appropriate for someone of their stature. When people who are working for superbosses emerge as new stars, superbosses are almost always extremely pleased. Glorious Bastards are something of an exception, because they sometimes treat stars who have emerged within their ranks as rivals to be ousted. But even these superbosses manage to keep stars around them whom most executives would find overwhelming. The other superbosses seem to have no limitations when it comes to celebrating the success of their employees. Miles Davis recruited John Coltrane when he was not well known, but soon after, jazz fans and fellow musicians began to revere Coltrane almost as much as they did Davis himself. Davis was quick to acknowledge that Coltrane was becoming as much of a star as he was and, instead of feeling threatened, was energized by it.26
Davis was so enamored with Coltrane, in fact, that he kept him in his band between 1955 and 1957, even though the saxophone player was struggling with a long-standing heroin addiction (Davis at this time was clean). Davis fired Coltrane in 1957 but took him back in 1958 and continued to play with him for another two years.27 Seeking out star protégés like this and relishing their success is pretty typical of superbosses. Moreover, because they expect most people who work for them to become stars, they will often tolerate personal problems, eccentricities, and big egos. Roger Corman would recruit young actors, writers, and directors whom he judged to be the most promising, even if they already had a reputation for arrogance.
If superbosses are eager to nurture soon-to-be or emerging stars, they also have no hesitations about hiring people who are already stars. Gene Roberts offered jobs at the Philadelphia Inquirer to journalists who were already famous, who were working for publications that were more prestigious, and who were paid more than he could manage. He simply assumed they would be tempted by the opportunity to work for him and, more often than not, he was right. Alice Waters invited some of the world’s most celebrated chefs, such as Jacques Pépin and Thomas Keller, to join her restaurant as guest chefs. She assumed they would welcome the opportunity to interact and learn, and a great many did. Others, such as the star British chef April Bloomfield, spent a summer at Chez Panisse as a way to see how America cooks before opening her first New York City restaurant.28 Larry Ellison jumped at the chance to hire Mark Hurd immediately after Hurd was let go as CEO of Hewlett-Packard. Although superbosses are notable mostly for making new stars, one of their most impressive assets is their ability to collect existing stars.
The confidence of superbosses also enables them to adapt their organizations to utilize their brilliant new hires. To most people in talent management, this is absolute heresy, but to a superboss, each outstanding new recruit offers a new opportunity to create value, and the company isn’t really seizing this business opportunity unless it is finding ways to use the new hire to the fullest. One critical way superbosses do that is by adapting the job description to fit the person, rather than make the person fit the job. Ralph Lauren once spotted a beautiful woman, Virginia Witbeck, in a burger restaurant in New York and loved her outfit: a man’s jacket, old corduroy pants, and an old fur jacket she had turned into a vest. He approached her table and offered her a job, telling her he wanted people with style. She served as Lauren’s muse, working in his design department for four years without a formal job title. To Lauren, she was a presence; he wanted to hear what she had to say . . . but he did it without ever actually defining what her job was supposed to be.29
In the case of some superbosses, having new employees define their own jobs is almost standard practice. When it came to working at Waters’s restaurant, according to one of her chefs, once you were in, “you just sort of . . . created your job.”30 At Industrial Light and Magic, George Lucas’s employees didn’t even have job descriptions. They were assigned tasks on various projects, according to what was needed and who was available. Lorne Michaels let his ensemble’s ideas and abilities constantly shape and reshape their contribution to the show. As this happened, writers sometimes became performers, and performers or assistant directors sometimes became writers. Utilizing people to the greatest extent possible often requires extreme flexibility, as well as a willingness to relinquish a degree of control. It requires boldness, which, as we’ve seen, is a hallmark of the superboss’s personality.
The extent to which superbosses can adapt their organizations to utilize promising employees is often extraordinary. For example, Jay Chiat remade his whole advertising agency to make the most of the capabilities that a British account-planning expert brought on board. Bill Walsh changed the very way his teams played football in order to find the best use for new talent. He let the position be defined by “what the player can do” instead of expecting the players to execute plays they were given. He expected the coaches writing the playbook to familiarize themselves with the team roster and adapt plays to the athletes’ special talents. Other superbosses took this approach even further. Miles Davis would let a new addition to his band—a John Coltrane or a Herbie Hancock—take the band off in a whole new artistic direction, bringing in diverse musical traditions, influences, and ideas. The result was something new, something Davis would never have created on his own. But for this jazz great, that was precisely the point.
Churn: Better Than We Think?
Because superbosses see uniquely capable recruits as business opportunities, they are rarely willing to pass up a candidate on the grounds that she “wouldn’t fit in.” Instead, a superboss will usually give the person a try. If the new recruit isn’t producing according to expectations, then the superboss will simply move the person to a different position or let her go. The idea that an employee’s placement might need to be rethought is not something that would cause a superboss even a moment’s hesitation.
This willingness to try people out often results in higher employee turnover than most businesses find desirable. Ellison acknowledged that his hiring practices resulted in an abnormally high rate of employees being let go or shifted to different jobs, but said this was necessary if he was going to field the best team possible. Roberts advised his editors to accept any resignations immediately, so that people who weren’t working out in the organization could be moved out quickly. Corman went even further in defending a high rate of employee turnover. He said that if his people weren’t constantly being lured away to high-paying jobs at major studios, it would mean he wasn’t doing a good enough job recruiting. Waters simply accepted it as a feature of her business that many people would only stay at her restaurant for as little as three months and that celebrity chefs might only stay for a week. Lucas assumed that when his employees developed their skills enough, many of them would leave to apply those skills to their own projects.
Their casual acceptance of employee churn is another important way in which superbosses chart their own course. Human-resources specialists consider it a failure if a new hire doesn’t stay long in the new job. Indeed, the length of time that new recruits stay is usually a key part of a human-resources specialist’s performance evaluation. Superbosses, in contrast, tend to prize talent and creativity over stability of staff. This means that a superboss will usually not hesitate to hire a person who is “intellectually overqualified,” who seems like “too much of a high flyer,” or who might not “stay around.”
The irony is that superbosses often create such an attractive work environment that many of their recruits do stay around—seemingly forever. Roberts’s recruits didn’t just leave desirable jobs with prestigious publications to come and work for the Philadelphia Inquirer; they turned down offers of desirable jobs with prestigious publications to stay at the Inquirer. People who worked for superbosses like Norman Brinker, Jay Chiat, Alice Waters, or Bill Walsh often didn’t want to work for anybody else. When they moved on, it was usually because they wanted to run their own operations. In these cases, many superbosses actually encouraged the employee’s departure, applauding it as the right move for them—even if the employee happened to be a star protégé.
Magic Reputations
Over time, all of the hiring practices common to superbosses become easier because superbosses become talent magnets. Gifted people are attracted to business leaders who appreciate their exceptional capabilities. The extreme talent that a superboss has already recruited creates an environment to which other great talent is attracted. People also start to notice that those who have worked for the superboss are achieving remarkable levels of success, and soon the superboss becomes someone every rising star wants to work for.
The extent to which people are eager to work for superbosses is often demonstrated by their willingness to accept lower salaries to take the job. Melissa Kelly was hardly the only experienced chef who worked a trial run without pay at Chez Panisse—it was a standard practice. There were no guarantees she would wind up with a job, either; many people who worked weeks for Waters didn’t get hired. As one former employee remembers, “When you finished work for the day, they’d say, ‘Would you like to come back tomorrow?’ You’d always talk at the end of the day to see if it was going to work for you and if it was working for the restaurant and the team.”31
Chiat’s son Marc recalled, “Everybody would give their left arm to work at Chiat/Day” despite the firm’s “notoriously low salaries.”32 Roberts noted that people’s eagerness to work for him was a major asset when it came to recruiting new hires with a limited budget. “We couldn’t attract them with money,” he said. Bill Sanders actually made it a policy to pay people less than what they were receiving at their previous job. That way, he said, he knew that no one was joining his firm just for the money.33
The superboss’s status as a talent magnet often comes to be regarded in almost mystical terms. People would describe Larry Ellison as possessing a unique magnetism, or charisma. “There’s no one like him,” one of his long-term employees said.34 One of Alice Waters’s colleagues commented, “Alice is sort of a magnet. She has this light, this energy that people are attracted to.”35 Steve Sullivan, a busboy who later opened the Acme Bread Company, remembers how the phone at Chez Panisse would ring at four in the morning with calls from college students seeking jobs. “It was some kid saying, ‘I’ve been reading about Chez Panisse and I really want to come to Berkeley and be an apprentice.’”36 Lorne Michaels’s manager, Bernie Brillstein, commented, “He was like the conduit for all the comedy brains at the time. He was just ‘The Guy.’”37 One of George Lucas’s associates at Industrial Light and Magic used the exact same words to describe George Lucas. “He was ‘The Guy.’ He attracted a lot of talented people.”38 Superbosses become the “magic names” in their industries, because in certain respects, they seem to have magic powers. But in fact it wasn’t magic at all; instead, as we’ve seen, it was a radically different way to think about attracting, selecting, and hiring the very best talent.
The beauty of being the talent magnet is that despite losing some stars who are ready to move on to bigger opportunities (and maybe precisely because you are losing them), you are constantly replenishing your bench, regenerating talent in your team and in your organization. And not just any employees, but the best! After all, the people with the highest aspirations, the greatest drive, and the strongest skills and aptitudes to back them up are the ones who most often move toward talent magnets. Superbosses offer a path for personal growth that is simply unrivaled. Who wouldn’t want to work for them?
Hiring like a Superboss
Most people in business know that unusual performance and innovation rest on the abilities of unusual people. What superbosses appreciate is that you need unconventional hiring practices to get those people. As we’ve seen, this translates into personal hiring, intuitive hiring, bold hiring, inventive hiring, opportunistic hiring, and ultimately, passionate hiring. This is not to say that superbosses, with their unique personalities and perspectives, do all the hiring at their companies. Of course not. Superbosses have HR professionals working for them as well—often whole teams of them. Over time, superbosses can get others around them to hire in their particular way, too. Including HR.
In 1987, Seen Lippert had just graduated from the Culinary Institute of America and was returning to her native California to look for a job. She badly wanted to work at Chez Panisse, and after much effort, finally landed an interview with Paul Bertolli, an executive chef. She showed up assuming she’d experience an ordinary corporate interview. When she sat down with Bertolli, she passed him her résumé—only to watch as he flicked it off the table. “I looked at him, and he said, ‘No, don’t pick it up.’ I was confused . . . He began to ask me questions like, ‘Tell me about yourself.’ ‘Where’d you grow up?’ ‘Where did you eat yesterday?’ ‘What did you eat last week?’ ‘What books do you read? Not necessarily cookbooks . . .’ ‘What books are you reading now?’ ‘What do you care about?’” Lippert reports having been “caught off guard”—how could it be otherwise—“but pleasantly.” (!)39 A month later, Lippert got a call. Would she like to come and try out?
By this time, sixteen years after Chez Panisse’s founding, Waters’s hiring practices had spread to others in her organization. This underlines a key argument in this book: the extraordinary practices that define superbosses and contribute to their success are teachable. If you are responsible for hiring in your organization, why not consider incorporating some of the techniques for selecting new hires that I’ve described here? You don’t need to throw everything you learned about human resources out the window. Take small steps and allow the superboss’s mentality to seep into your existing hiring process.
For starters, you should resist the urge to automatically eliminate prospective hires solely on the basis of their past credentials and experience—remembering that in doing so, you may be weeding out the very best, most creative candidates. Don’t eliminate job descriptions, but at the same time, don’t slavishly follow them by hiring only those prospects who allow you to check off every last criterion. Don’t throw out the format of the formal interview, but feel free to loosen it up and incorporate new elements, such as holding the interview in an unusual venue.
When you’re first beginning to experiment with the superboss approach, don’t make every person you hire an unorthodox pick. Start with just one or two hires and work from there. You’ll have to follow up by borrowing other practices discussed in this book; you can’t just hire an unusual person and expose her to all the ordinary ways you manage people. If you really attracted genuinely unusual talent but did no more, they’d probably head for the hills before they even downloaded your company’s iPhone app. Be prepared to behave as a partner and to learn and adapt. And don’t forget about the rest of your team; if left to their own devices, they may well drive out the “strange” newcomer. Let them in on your game plan. You might be surprised by how receptive they’ll be once they understand and, even more important, experience firsthand what the superboss’s world looks like.
Making a superboss-style hire isn’t a Hail Mary pass to try when your business is in trouble and you’re desperate to show results. It’s something to try when you’re open to deliberately rethinking what you do in an effort to get better. The risks aren’t that great—you won’t be stuck for five years if you fail—but when hiring more intuitively and unconventionally, you still have to make an investment of time and effort. You need to accept that you’re figuring it out as you go and that there are no guarantees that any particular hire will pan out. But there never is, anyway, so why not try? If it doesn’t work out, or even if it does and the new hire eventually moves on to other things, you’ll have your first lesson in churn. If you’re lucky or if you’re even better at this superboss thing than you think, your former employee will make a name for herself elsewhere. When that happens, as it eventually will when the superboss playbook starts to take hold, expect more messages from LinkedIn that people are “looking at your profile,” and expect to start hearing from outsiders who are now “curious” about what you’re up to and wondering whether you may be hiring. Gaining a reputation as a talent magnet doesn’t have to take long; you can begin to develop one after just a few employees successfully spin off. And when people do begin to take notice, you’ll experience one of the greatest feelings of accomplishment in your career. Add in the upside that comes when the greatest talent starts seeking you out, and you’ll really have something.
Discovering the “diamond in the rough,” that one person who doesn’t fit the narrow constraints we place on so many things in life—well, that does take courage. It’s hard to give up the sense of control that conventional ways of choosing give us. For hiring managers, the superboss methods of spotting desirable employees may feel risky and dangerous, especially if you’ve never done it before. But remember: the track record that superbosses bring to the challenge is so overwhelmingly positive that we’d be crazy not to try.
Spotting and hiring the right “raw material” are vital for anyone who seeks to generate exceptional talent, but it is only a first step. Once you have unusually talented people, you’ve got to motivate them to excel. You have to get them to push as hard as they humanly can to achieve extraordinary results, both for the organization’s sake and to promote their own growth. What’s the secret to such extreme motivation? Superbosses crack the whip as well as anyone, constantly raising their demands for performance. But they also do something else that exceedingly few bosses do, even good ones. As we’ll see in the next chapter, it’s this ingredient that creates such die-hard emotional commitment, propelling even the most talented people to do more than they ever thought possible.