I am not a big fan of Steve overall, but the one thing he inherently understood was “identity”. How I am using “identity” in this context is, how someone sees themselves. It is the story they tell themselves about themselves. I am a good leader. I and good at solving problems. I am a dog person. I am tidy or I am sloppy. And on and on.

If you hire for identity rather than skillset, you don’t have to manage people. They self-manage. My best managers were ones where the product that they managed was a part of their identity. How it worked. How reliable it was. They weren’t always the smartest people. It often took them longer to solve problems. BUT, they solved them on their own, without me having to supervise. Because they would not give up on the problem until it was solved. To give up would be to admit that their identity was flawed, and that just was not an option.

When you hire people like this effectively as a leader you must really allow them to own it. They must have the responsibility and the authority to make decisions, even when those decisions differ from what decision you would make. Results are what matters.

Steve understood this.

If we assume the natural time evolution of groups of people is to decohere (with sqrt t?), being a leader means keeping everyone roughly in phase?