Скачать или смотреть Steve Jobs on Decision Making and conflict

Source :    • Steve Jobs President & CEO, NeXT Computer ...  

Transcript :

Steve Jobs : Management, what's our management style? How do we resolve conflict?

I’ve never believed in the theory that if we’re on the same management team and a decision has to be made, and I decide in a way that you don’t like, I can say, “Come on, buy into the decision. You know, buy into it. We're all on the same team. You don’t agree, but buy into it. Let’s go make it happen.” Because what happens is, sooner or later, you’re paying somebody to do what they think is right, but then you’re trying to get them to do what they think isn’t right. Sooner or later, it outs, and you end up having that conflict.

I’ve always felt that the best way is to get everybody in a room and talk it through until you agree. Now, that’s not everybody in the company, but that’s everybody that’s really involved in that decision and needs to execute it.

So that’s how we try to run NeXT. The way we run NeXT is, we have a team at the top we call the policy team. There are eight people. Mike is on it, I’m on it, and we have six other people on it.

The key is, we have two things we try to do. One is, we try to differentiate between the really important decisions and the ones that we don’t have to make. For the really important ones, we work on them until we all agree, because we’re paying people to tell us what to do. In other words, I don’t view that we pay people to do things — that’s easy, to find people to do things. What’s harder is to find people to tell you what should be done. That’s what we look for.

So we pay people a lot of money, and we expect them to tell us what to do. When that’s your attitude, you shouldn’t run off and do things if people don’t all feel good about them. The key to making that work is to realize there aren’t that many things that any one team really has to decide. We might have 25 really important things we have to decide on in a year — not a lot.

So that’s how we try to run it. Sometimes it works, and sometimes we’re still working on it. I can’t think of — maybe there’s once or twice — but I can’t even recall a time when I’ve said, “Damn it, I’m the CEO, and we’re doing it this way.”

I can recall a time when I’ve said, “We don’t see eye to eye, and you’re off the team.” You know, I’ve had to say that once or twice over a prolonged period of time when a person has not wanted to go in the same direction we’ve wanted to go in as a team. It’s my job every once in a while to say, “Hey, you want to go this way, we want to go this way. It’s not working.”

But when people are on the team, then we work it out.