Would You Have Hired Steve Jobs?
It’s easy in retrospect to say you would grab the leader who drove the creation of the iPhone, iPad and so many other things that built Apple into the most valuable company in the world.
But would you have taken on this scruffy college drop-out who showed some interest in technology but looked like a hippie and smelled so bad that Atari had to assign him to the night shift to placate co-workers who complained he seldom showered or used a deodorant? The negatives went beyond a lack of obvious qualifications, body odor and dress. He had shown himself to be, says Walter Isaacson in his best-selling biography of Jobs, manipulative and arrogant, and “a dreadful manager” who was not a great engineer and didn’t know much about technology.
Not many of us would have looked past these off-putting weaknesses to imagine his passion for perfection, an uncanny ability to understand the needs and desires of consumers, and uncompromisingly high standards. You might have hesitated, but Peter Drucker would have urged you to look again. Jobs is an instructive example of the management guru’s over-riding principle:
Hire people for their strengths, not their absence of weaknesses.
Avoiding weakness, Drucker explains in his classic The Effective Executive, will at best produce mediocrity.
