“Apple was a very bottom-up company when it came to a lot of its great ideas. We hired truly great people and gave them the room to do great work. A lot of companies... hire people to tell them what to do. We hire people to tell us what to do.”
No Hierarchy of Ideas
From Steve Jobs, interviewed by Terry Gross for Fresh Air on NPR, broadcast February 22, 1996. Jobs was at NeXT, looking back at Apple’s earlier years. The rendered passage starts partway through his answer; he opens with the principle the rest follows from: “there wasn’t a hierarchy of ideas that mapped into the hierarchy of the organization”, and as he restates it next, “great ideas could come from anywhere.” He closes the answer with the result: a culture “much more collegial than hierarchical.” NPR’s archive hosts the audio but no official transcript; the wording above is reconstructed from a YouTube auto-caption of the rebroadcast, and the secondary-source attribution is consistent across Wikiquote, quotepark, and wist.info.
The “we hire people to tell us what to do” line is the most-quoted part of this passage. In the interview it follows from the principle Jobs states upfront: at Apple, ideas were not ranked by where in the org chart they came from. If a good idea can come from anywhere, the people in charge cannot be the only ones with ideas, and the people doing the work have to be the ones who decide what the work is.
Fourteen years later at D8, in conversation with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, Jobs made the same observation as a rule rather than a description: “you have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy. The best ideas have to win, otherwise good people don’t stay.” The 1996 version describes Apple’s culture; the 2010 version names what a company loses without it.