Hiring & Talent
Finding, hiring, and developing great people.
It is infinitely better to have a few good Men, than many indifferent ones.
SourceLetter to James McHenry · National Archives on Founders Online
Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians. They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn't been computer science, these people would have been doing amazing things in other fields.
SourcePlayboy interview (1985) · via Wikiquote
If there is anything that a man can do well, I say let him do it. Give him a chance.
It's not all about talent. It's about dependability, consistency, and being able to improve. If you work hard and you're coachable, and you understand what you need to do, you can improve.
You go to the draft board and think, 'Here's a nose tackle. Who needs a nose tackle?' Well, eight teams in front of you need a nose tackle, and there's two nose tackles. It's something you have to figure out where you can get the players to play in your system.
Research shows that there is only half as much variation in student achievement between schools as there is among classrooms in the same school. If you want your child to get the best education possible, it is actually more important to get him assigned to a great teacher than to a great school.
Employers have decided that having the breadth of knowledge that's associated with a four-year degree is often something they want to see in the people they give that job to.
I think it matters whether someone has a good heart.
I am looking for a lot of men who have an infinite capacity to not know what can't be done.
Life's too short to hang out with people who aren't resourceful.
If you are good enough to compete for a top-level corporate job, you should be smart enough to know what the job pays the other gender and negotiate accordingly. If you are an employer, and you don't pay an employee market wages, regardless of gender or orientation, you will end up with what you deserve.
The people I don't like to work with are people like me. I need people who can complement my skill set, people who can do the nitty gritty with me.
Culture is very important to the Mavs. Your best player has to be a fit for what you want the culture of the team to be. He has to be someone who leads by example. Someone who sets the tone in the locker room and on the court. It isn't about who talks the most or the loudest. It is about the demeanor and attitude he brings.
I always tell people that you should only hire people to be on your team if you would work for them.
I will only hire someone to work directly for me if I would work for that person. It's a pretty good test.
The best evaluation I can make of a player is to look in his eyes and see how scared they are.
My philosophy is that you don't motivate players with speeches; you have motivated players that you draft. That's where they come in, and those are the guys that are competitive. You can not teach competitiveness.
When hiring somebody, I never ask to see a curriculum vitae. I feel that since I didn't have one myself, it would be a bit presumptuous to ask to see anyone else's.
We hire people who want to make the best things in the world.
Casting sometimes is fate and destiny more than skill and talent, from a director's point of view.
I'm very used to working with first time actors - you can just look back at 'E.T.' with Drew Barrymore, and Christian Bale from 'Empire of the Sun,' who'd never made a movie before.
I think each person, if you're a CEO, the most important thing is to have - to me, is to pick people around you that aren't like you, that complement you. Because you want to build a puzzle; you don't want to stack Chiclets up and have everyone be the same. And so I believe in diversity with a capital D.
When you're an engineer, you want to analyze things a lot. But if you believe that the most important data points are people, then you have to make conclusions in relatively short order. Because you want to push the people who are doing great. And you want to either develop the people who are not or, in a worst case, they need to be somewhere else.
What Beats brings to Apple are guys with very rare skills. People like this aren't born every day. They're very rare. They really get music deeply.
We could build just about anything that you could dream of. But that's not the question. The thing that Beats provides us is a head start. They provide us with incredible people that don't grow on trees.
A lot of times I find that people who are blessed with the most talent don't ever develop that attitude, and the ones who aren't blessed in that way are the most competitive and have the biggest heart.
When I work, I work very hard. So I look to work with people who have that level of dedication. And I depend on that from everyone. From the director to my crews that I work with.
I like to work with people that I like hanging out with, that I admire, that are really smart and talented, and we can problem solve together.
If you're lucky enough to find a guy with a lot of head and a lot of heart, he's never going to come off the field second.
Nobody wants to give up good players.
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