From the early days of Apple, Steve Jobs knew he wanted the build a successful company. At one point, Apple hired two “professional” managers from outside the company. Then Jobs promptly fired them.
“It didn’t work at all,” a young Steve Jobs says in a video making the rounds on YouTube. “Most of them were bozos. They knew how to manage but they didn’t know how to do anything.”
The video was recently resurrected by Quartz at Work. Though it’s pre-black turtleneck era Jobs, the insight Apple’s founder shares is timeless.
After swearing off seasoned professionals who had management experience, Jobs says he started looking for a different quality: passion. “We wanted people that were insanely great at what they did, but were not necessarily those seasoned professionals,” he explains. “But who had at the tips of their fingers and in their passion the latest understanding of where technology was and what they could do with that technology.”
Jobs didn’t care how polished someone’s resume was, or where they had been before. He wanted passionate problem solvers. To replace those external managers he fired, Jobs pulled in Debi Coleman, who had been working in a different department. She was an inexperienced 32-year-old who had a English literature degree. (Coincidentally, this one of the majors Mark Cuban predicts will have the most value in the coming years.) This hire stuck. After working as the company’s manufacturing chief, Coleman went on to become Apple’s CFO by age 35.
