Run by Ideas

From Steve Jobs’s onstage conversation with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at the All Things Digital D8 conference on June 1, 2010, during the segment about Apple’s organizational structure. The form of the passage that propagated through later quotation is “If you wanna hire great people and have them stay working for you, you have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy. The best ideas have to win, otherwise good people don’t stay.” The All Things Digital liveblog renders the second sentence as “The best ideas have to win, no matter who has them,” so the wording above is the polished form of the exchange rather than a perfect transcription from the floor.

A strong person in a hierarchy-decided room learns over time that title beats argument, and eventually stops trying. The corollary Jobs does not state but is doing the work: the team self-selects for deference, and no one left in the room will tell the title-holders they are wrong.