> He assembled the top talent to produce the best products that pushed our experience with technology forward.
Assembling top talent is something a lot of people could do, what made Jobs special is that he did that while still actually giving a shit about the quality of the product his company produced. "Oh, he just" is less a way of dismissing jobs than it is a way of saying "hey assholes, you could be more like Jobs if you just actually gave a fuck".
Absolutely not. First you need the ability to recognize top talent. That's already super hard. Then you have to convince them to come work for you. Top talent is not always just motivated by money alone, so how do you attract them? Then after you hire them you have to retain them, which is also hard, because you have to understand what they are building, and inspire them.
Assembling top talent is something very few can do. Assembling it and then keeping that talent together and getting it to work in some manner of harmony, almost nobody can do that, it's an extraordinarily rare skill.
He sure knew how to keep people together!
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/08/steve-woz...
Yeah that's exactly why Jobs never did that. Nobody has to "recognize top talent" to assemble it.
He knew that talent likes a good challenge without being micromanaged. The talent becomes top talent when they overcome the challenges and accomplish something new and exciting. You retain them by maximizing their autonomy. That's all.
You need to have a vision that top talent believes in, in order to retain them.
You can either listen to what he's literally saying, or just be impressed by his rhetoric.
He says pretty bluntly they: "... were not necessarily those seasoned professionals, but who had at the tips of their fingers and in their passion the latest understanding of where the technology was and what we could do with that technology"
So, basically find young people with tons of enthusiasm for their career, put them all together on a team, and let them sort themselves out. It's naturally much easier to find motivation than "top talent". There's nothing special about that strategy and he's not the first to think of it. Like he says, "the vision" is all the managing he does, but let's be honest there are plenty of great engineers who don't really have an opinion on their work beyond how free they are to do it and experiment. They don't have to give a rat's ass about what their boss wants to deliver it anyway.
Also: "Leadership is having a vision, being able to articulate that so that people around you can understand it, and getting a consensus on a common vision".
If you watch the rest of the video I linked it's pretty clear that Apple probably did hire and fire plenty of morons that the engineers would weed out (specifically mentioned is the Macintosh team).
The reason hiring is more difficult today vs then isn't because Steve Jobs was so great, but because the internet has brought upon the doorstep of every business a flood of highly motivated drones who don't know what they're doing and will only bother learning if they're getting paid to do it. The demise of entry level jobs and other cost cutting is partially to blame as well.
I guess the modern solution is contract-to-hire so there's some kind of buffer between the horde out there and the workplace you're cultivating.