“If you read any management textbook, it says 'don't hire the divas' … But the people who are the divas … are the ones who will drive the culture and company to excellence … they drive people hard, they're controversial, and they care passionately.”
About this quote
Schmidt gave this answer in Greylock’s “Blitzscaling 08: Eric Schmidt on Structuring Teams and Scaling Google” (October 2015), transcribed at Startup Archive. The talk names Steve Jobs and Bill Joy as examples; Joy is the Sun Microsystems co-founder, whom Schmidt worked with as Sun’s CTO.
Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg sharpen the same point in How Google Works (Grand Central, 2014). “Knaves prioritize the individual over the team; divas think they are better than the team, but want success equally for both.” Divas are tolerated “as long as their contributions match their outlandish egos”; knaves “need to be dealt with as quickly as possible.” The passage is reproduced at Startup Archive; the print page has not been independently verified.