A small team of A-players can run circles around a giant team of B- and C-players.
—Steve Jobs1
Hiring decisions present one of the key challenges to creating a Pirate culture. As Steve put it, key hiring decisions are as important as creating a new product. He even put a good hire on the same level as the moment he first saw a graphical user interface and a mouse, at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, and realized they would be the cornerstones for the future of computing. So many companies have a culture that encourages people to fall into line, just like life in The Navy. These types of organizations generally are able to accomplish little more than improving on the innovative ideas of others.
Too often we hire clones—worthy clones, hardworking, ambitious, disciplined, compliant, well educated, often trained and proven in a competitive firm. You know the story. Just look around you, maybe even at yourself.
To really succeed in a fast-changing world where yesterday’s rules are being broken every day, we need to learn to be brave and resist the usual, the familiar.
As advertising guru David Ogilvy wrote in his book Confessions of an Advertising Man, “Business needs massive transfusions of talent. And talent, I believe, is most likely to be found among non-conformists, dissenters and rebels.”2
Miles Young, the global CEO of Ogilvy & Mather, has recommended that business people “hire more nutters.” One night over a cocktail at the Zeta Bar in Sydney, I asked him, “Is a nutter the same as a Pirate?”
“No,” he said. “They’re different. But they serve the same purpose. Nutters think totally differently than us. They come at things from a very different perspective. Pirates are on the same wavelength, but do it their own way and with their rules.”
Positive deviants is another term I’ve heard to describe this type. And former British prime minister Tony Blair, in his autobiography, described them as crazy people. “In my experience,” he wrote, “there are two types of crazy people: those who are just crazy, and therefore dangerous; and those whose craziness lends them creativity, strength, and ingenuity, and verve.”3
I love these ideas. You want people who dare to be different! You want Pirates—where the skull and crossbones may not be part of the company’s symbol, but they’re Pirates nonetheless. People who take risks, live at times a little on the edge, flaunt rules when justified, laugh loudly as the wind lashes their face and their pursuers fade from view into the distance behind. I always want to work with people like this, and so should you.
Whether you think of them as nonconformists, dissenters, rebels, pirates, nutters, positive deviants, or as Blair’s crazies, make sure your team has a solid sprinkling of them. They will challenge your thinking, fuel your ideas, pump up your momentum, boost your competitive edge, and quite simply make your business a winner.
And make sure you yourself provide a dose of this magic on occasion. You’re unlikely to accomplish anything great in your career without it.
Steve had this almost scary view of the culture he wanted, the kinds of people who were suited to that culture, and the mix of people required to round out the needs. It was as if he had simply grasped intuitively the ultimate landscape necessary to build and sell the ultimate product.
Yet when Steve first organized the Mac group and selected its leaders, he was so caught up in having young, entrepreneurial people that he missed one crucial factor: the need for wisdom. Life experiences have a major importance in determining if you are up to the responsibility being placed on your shoulders, especially in terms of handling major problems and major disappointments.
He soon recognized the need to include what he had taken to calling people of wisdom. By that he meant people like me—a good deal older than 22 (which if I recall was, incredibly, the average age of the techies on the original Mac team). And not just older, but with the kind of real-world business knowledge only acquired from the experience of working your way through tough challenges of product development, meeting marketplace demands, and finding ways to cope with the often unrealistic corporate restrictions of how-it’s-always-done-around-here.
For their book In the Company of Giants, authors Rama Dev Jager and Rafael Ortiz, interviewing Steve, asked him about putting together a team. He told them that “in most things in life, the dynamic range between average quality and the best quality is, at most, two-to-one.” But in advanced fields—he used the example of hardware design—he observed that “the dynamic range between what an average person could accomplish and what the best person could accomplish was 50 or 100 to 1.”
When Jager and Ortiz challenged Steve by pointing out that a manager, especially in a start-up, may not have much time to spend hunting for talent and interviewing candidates, Steve came down heavily: “I disagree totally,” he said. “I think it’s the most important job.”
He told them, “When you’re in a startup, the first ten people will determine whether the company succeeds or not.”
His conclusion was that you must find extraordinary people: “the cream of the cream.”4
Steve believed in small, integrated units. He had a vision of a project group always small enough that every member—every member—stayed involved all the way through. Off-site meetings for the entire team were one key way of making that happen. The commitments made at a meeting in front of all team members were sometimes even more powerful than a one-on-one promise to Steve; they were essential for keeping projects on schedule.
For me, the timing of the first Macintosh off-site was perfect, coming not long after I joined Apple. Though I had been hired to be vice president of human resources for the entire company, Steve also included me as a member of the Mac team. So I had two jobs: one on the corporate side with responsibilities for the whole company, the other as a kind of graybeard for Steve—older, more experienced in business, and with my years at IBM and Intel, more experienced as well in the world of technology.
Want to recruit and hire highly talented innovators? Here are some Jobsian ideas for hiring:
It’s become part of the history of Silicon Valley that Steve often said, “Make sure you’re hiring only A-players.” Hire a few B-players, he said, and they hire Bs and Cs, and pretty soon the whole operation is going to pot.
Obviously not everyone can afford to hire only A-players. So how do you find people who are exceptionally talented and a good fit for the team?
As mentioned earlier, one of the greatest sources of talented prospects is your own employees. Really sharp people generally prefer the company of other really sharp people. When you need to hire someone, you ask the people on the team to recommend somebody they admire.
Steve said employees who did this should be given a reward for helping the company in its recruiting efforts. So he and I set up a program called Esprit de Corps, which paid employees $500 for every new hire they had recommended. We also gave each a lapel button like one awarded to World War I pilots for doing a great job in the air battles, along with a T-shirt stating they had just been awarded the badge. It was more hype than real, but it worked—reminding and encouraging others to think about A-players they could recommend.
The team member who brought the person in was held accountable to make sure the new hire had all the information needed to be successful, so the relationship was ongoing.
Eventually the new Macintosh employees’ reward program came to be used all over Apple.
Making your best talent central to the recruiting process is a secret to sustaining creativity. Many of the people brought in as the group expanded were suggested by team members. A classic example was Chris Espinosa, who when he was a college freshman had as his advisor a man named Andy Hertzfeld. Andy became one of the early Mac Pirates; when the need came up for someone to create a Macintosh owner’s manual, Andy suggested Chris. How well did it work out? Chris was employee number eight and is still at Apple as I write this.
Today, the tactic of paying employees for finding new talent is widespread. A San Francisco company called Practice Fusion offers an example of this approach at work. The company helps people put their medical information online in a way that is secure yet makes the information readily available to any hospital or doctor when needed. When a candidate is hired, the company rewards the employee who introduced the person with a payment that can be as high as $10,000. Maybe that’s part of the reason Practice Fusion is the largest and fastest growing in its field.
Journalist Sharlyn Lauby tells a story she heard from an employee of a small young company providing services in its local area. “Two years ago,” the employee had told her, “one of our CEO’s friends introduced us to an engineer from a big tech company. We didn’t think much of it—he was happy with his job, and we weren’t looking to hire anyone.”
But something about the atmosphere at the company had obviously appealed to the man. “He started coming to our offices on Friday nights to hang out with the team.” They realized later that the man had kept coming because he had been picking up clues about the pulse of the company. “He saw over time how . . . excited we were about our progress, how rapidly we improved our product, how big our dreams were.” Soon he “caught the startup bug.”
The ending of the story goes even beyond what you might expect. “Skip ahead two years to today. He’s now our lead engineer.” He even brought along his roommate—“another big-tech-firm engineer”—who also joined the start-up team.5
And then there was the case of a San Francisco company with the odd name of I Love Rewards. They were throwing twice-a-month cocktail parties at the upscale W Hotel for their employees and executives. The functions had a dual purpose: they built camaraderie and team spirit, but they also provided the company with an opportunity to give job candidates the chance to meet staffers in a much less intimidating environment than a formal job interview. In the relaxed, laid-back setting of the hotel, staffers were able to size up candidates, while the candidates soaked up a sense of positive vibes of the company’s people. It was a chance for both sides to talk about goals and expectations.
As of this writing, I Love Rewards—now bearing the more gracious company name of Achievers—was expanding so fast that their website carried an announcement of their “biggest recruiting effort in company history.”
In time, I learned a lesson about dealing with Steve when he was harsh, angry, or abusive over a decision or suggestion made or some work presented. My insight came through the experience of an executive on the Mac team. To protect his reputation, I’ll call him Don Vincent.
Steve was looking for someone to lead the creation of the multimillion-dollar Mac factory, and the search led to Don, who was then working at Hewlett-Packard and had a lot of solid recommendations. Once Don started working for Apple, it became clear he was not really an entrepreneur at heart and, even worse, he had a very thin skin—not a good quality in someone working for Steve Jobs.
For example, on one meeting where Don was making a presentation about the factory robots, Steve was very unhappy with the selections Don was presenting. He bounded out of his chair and started waving his hands like a robot, carrying on in something of a frenzy. At one point he demanded, “Don, if you were a robot, what color would you want to be!?”
No one in the history of manufacturing had ever been asked to deal with the feelings of a robot! Don was dumbfounded by the question and very embarrassed in front of the staff. He had no response to offer. Instead of pushing back, he took the criticism personally. He got up and left the room.
After the meeting, I told Steve, “You need to be careful in how you talk to a sensitive person like Don, particularly putting him down in front of the group.” I also told him, “It’s okay to attack me, because I understand you, and I can accept it. But Don took it very personally. You need to meet with him and apologize and make sure he understands what you were trying to communicate—that it was not personal.”
Before Steve could meet with him, Don had found himself another job and handed in his resignation. I couldn’t get him to change his mind. When I told Steve, his reaction was that Don “isn’t a Pirate.” But at our next Monday meeting with the staff, Steve led me to bring up a discussion about the incident, which we discussed as a mistake, one that we hopefully learned from.
This is a lesson that applies with all strong-willed leaders: When there’s a blowup, don’t let it go without closure on the issues. And another lesson: In the hiring process, we were so wrapped up in issues of Don’s ability to build the factory that we missed the key element of “could he deal with the Pirate leader?” In Don’s previous job at Hewlett-Packard, the culture of “the HP Way” was very easy going, with not much criticism ever given to anyone. This was the experience that taught Steve and me that not everyone can adapt to a Pirate culture. Nor can everyone adapt to a leader who is at times as harsh and critical as Steve.
Today when you walk into an Apple store, every experience—from the welcome greetings to customers, to things running on the demo computers, iPods, iPads, and iPhones—is carefully planned. Today’s Apple sales training is about dealing with customers instead of closing sales. The Apple training manual is about steps to service, laid out in an acronym APPLE, where A stands for Approach, and so on.
Employees are trained to avoid telling a customer, “I don’t understand.” If a customer mispronounces a product name, employees are taught not to correct the person. Employees at Apple’s retail stores are expected to understand the issues of their clients and make an extra effort to find solutions for them.
No wonder Apple stores generate more visitors per quarter than Disney’s top four amusement parks together see in a year. The Apple stores’ annual sales per square foot, as of 2011, is over $5,600, far ahead of all other U.S. chains. Second place goes to the exclusive, up-scale jewelry chain of Tiffany & Co, in business for well over a century; for Tiffany, the comparable sales figure is less than $3,000 per square foot. What’s more, the total annual sales of the Apple stores increased in 2011 by a nearly unbelievable 70 percent over the previous year; the comparable figure for Tiffany was 15 percent.
Clearly, the training of the staff in the Apple stores has paid off.
The late, great American anthropologist, Margaret Mead once said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
Notes
1. Rama Dev Jager and Rafael Ortiz, In the Company of Giants: Candid Conversations with the Visionaries of the Digital World (Darby, PA: Diane Pub Company, 1997).
2. David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man (New York: Atheneum/Simon & Schuster, 1963), 47.
3. Tony Blair, A Journey: My Political Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 9.
4. Jager and Ortiz, op. cit.
5. Sharlyn Lauby, “3 Ways to Find Top Talent for Your Startup,” American Express OPEN Forum, September 24, 2011.