I heard an interview on NPR with Steve Jobs. He stated...
We hired people to tell us what to do, not people who we needed to tell what to do.
What a concept. Whether it was true or not, the concept is powerful. Hire the best people, let them tell you how to make things faster, better, cheaper, or any measure of improvement.
Let these "brilliant" people invent the future, with Jobs guidance of course. Jobs told the story of the Mouse and the GUI. He visited Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) to see a demo of DynaBook.
What he saw was a mouse that cost a $1,000 and but needed to be $30. A GUI that would replace the screen and ASCII characters for all computers to date, including Apple II's.
But without the right people, none of that woudl have appeared in the Mac.
His last comment in the interview (1996) was that it is rare to have a company that actually does that - hire the people to tell the leadership what to do. Hire people to improve the products and processes. More common ego gets in the way, lack of listening to the market is the first step of lack of listening to your staff. Once you start down that path, only the followers will want to work there, the leaders will move on.
