Management by Values

From Steve Jobs’s May 29, 2003 talk to MBA students at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, looking back on running Pixar and Apple two years before his Stanford commencement address on the same campus. The line closes an extended riff on what Jobs calls “management by values,” an idea he credits to a teacher Walt Disney recruited to run Disney University: “you find people that want the same things you want, and then just get the hell out of their way.”

If a manager’s job is to find people who want what you want and then get out of their way, then almost everything rides on the hire. You are not going to steer them into the goal later, so it has to be there when they walk in the door. That is why recruiting sits at the top: it is the one moment you select for the goal instead of trying to manage people toward it afterward, and you only get to make that choice once.