Corner Office - Guy Kawasaki - I Want 5 Sentences, Not ‘War and Peace’ - Question

Q. At what point in your career did you first become somebody’s boss?

A. I was probably 28 or 29 years old and in the jewelry business. I started my career counting diamonds and schlepping gold jewelry around the world. The jewelry business is a very, very tough business — tougher than the computer business. You truly have to understand how to take care of your customers.

I learned a very valuable lesson: how to sell. Sales is everything. As long as you’re making sales, you’re still in the game. That lesson has stuck with me throughout my career.

Q. So how did the transition into management go?

A. When I was getting my education, I fell in love with the writings of Peter Drucker. He was my hero. I had a naïve belief that when I became a manager, it was going to be like Peter Drucker’s books. That is, I was going to be the effective executive. I was going to talk to people about their goals. I was going to help them actualize.

My thinking was: I’m a natural leader, so I’m going to study what’s hard and mathematical like finance and operations research, not the touchy-feely stuff that would be easy.

When I finally got a management position, I found out how hard it is to lead and manage people. The warm, fuzzy stuff is hard. The quantitative stuff is easy — you either don’t do much of this as a manager or you have people working for you to do it.

Maybe it was just my education, but much of education is backwards. You study all the hard stuff, and then you find out in the real world that you don’t use it. As long as you can use an HP 12 calculator or a spreadsheet, you have the finance knowledge that you need for most management positions. I should have taken organizational behavior and social psychology — and maybe abnormal psychology, come to think of it.

Q. So how did you learn to do it?

A. First, over time, you develop some knowledge and expertise in managing and leading — in many cases because you’re forced to.

Second, you learn to put in a cushion between you and the front line. You should hire people who are better at doing things than you are. So, in my case, I was not the warm-and-fuzzy manager, so I tried to hire people who reported to me who were warm-and-fuzzy types to provide a buffer. If you can’t do it, you should find somebody who can.

Q. Tell me about the best bosses you worked for.

A. My boss in the jewelry business was great because he taught me how to sell and how a business reputation was built on trust.

My boss at Apple was a guy named Mike Murray, who was the director of marketing of the Macintosh division. He gave me so much rope that I could hang myself and sometimes I did. After a while, your neck gets stronger and you also learn not to hang yourself.

A few levels above me, I learned from Steve Jobs that people can change the world. Maybe we didn’t get 95 percent market share, but we did make the world a better place. I learned from Steve that some things need to be believed to be seen. These are powerful lessons — very different from saying we just want to eke out an existence and keep our heads down.

Q. So how do you create a sense of mission in a company?

A. The foundation is the desire to make meaning in the world — to make the world a better place. We believed in the Mac division that we were making the world a better place by making people more creative and productive. Google, at its core, probably believes it’s making the world a better place by democratizing information. So it starts from this core of how you make meaning, which translates into some kind of physical product or service that actually delivers.

Q. How do you hire?

A. The most important thing is that you hire people who complement you and are better than you in specific areas. Good people hire people better than themselves. So A players hire A+ players. But others hire below their skills to make themselves look good. So B players hire C players. C players hire D players, etc.

Time and again in Silicon Valley, two engineers who are the founders of a company have a very unique perspective. They believe that engineering is hard, and everything else is easy. Sales, marketing, finance, operations, manufacturing — all that is easy.

With this perspective, they think that if they set their mind to it, they could be the best V.P. of manufacturing, best V.P. of finance, best V.P. of marketing, best V.P. of sales, best V.P. of everything.

However, in a perfect world, someone who is a truly great engineer and founder would appreciate the difficulty of marketing, and hire a marketing person who is far better than he or she is.

In a perfect world, you would take pride in the fact that you hired someone who is better than you. Hardly anybody has that attitude, though.

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via nytimes.com

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