Steve Jobs on leadership

In the clip below, Steve argues:

“The greatest people are self-managing. They don’t need to be managed. Once they know what to do, they’ll go figure out how to do it… What they need is a common vision, and that’s what leadership is. Leadership is having a vision, being able to articulate that so the people around you can understand it, and getting consensus on a common vision.”

Borrowing from his tagline for the original Mac, Steve continues:

“We wanted people who were insanely great at what they did… and the neatest thing that happens when you get a core group of ten great people is that it becomes self-policing as to who they let into that group. So I consider the most important job of someone like myself to be recruiting.”

This observation on the importance of getting the first ten people right is a refrain you constantly hear from the very best founders. As Patrick Collison put it:

“A large part of the reason why the first ten people you hire are so important is because you’re not just hiring those first ten people. You’re actually hiring 100 people, because you should think of each of those people as bring along another ten people with them.”

The best leaders recruit “insanely great” people and align them around a common vision.