MBAs have been tremendously popular for more than half a century, but one of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs believed that the best managers were found elsewhere.
Steve Jobs had a theory about management that cut against decades of corporate orthodoxy. Having lived through Apple’s early attempts to professionalize its leadership, he came to believe that the most effective managers weren’t trained administrators — they were exceptional doers who stepped into management only because they felt no one else could do the job as well as they could.
“We went through that stage in Apple where we went out and thought, ‘We’re going to be a big company. Let’s hire professional management,'” Jobs recalled. “We went out and hired a bunch of professional managers. It didn’t work at all. Most of them were bozos. They knew how to manage, but they didn’t know how to do anything.”
The consequences of that mismatch were predictable. Great talent doesn’t stay where it can’t learn. “If you’re a great person, why would you want to work for somebody that you can’t learn anything from?”
Jobs then laid out what he believed was the defining trait of the best managers: “You know who the best managers are? They’re the great individual contributors who never, ever want to be a manager, but decide they have to be a manager because no one else is going to be able to do as good a job as they can.”
The logic is almost paradoxical — the best managers are the ones who didn’t want the job. But it makes sense. Someone who is deeply skilled in their domain, who has high standards because they know exactly what good work looks like, and who takes on management only out of necessity, brings something a career administrator simply can’t: credibility. Their team knows they’ve done the work. They can’t be bluffed, and they don’t need to be.
This isn’t just a philosophy Jobs articulated in interviews. It was reflected in how Apple operated — a company long known for placing deep technical experts in leadership roles, with Jobs himself famously staying close to the product even as CEO. Jobs had also elaborated elsewhere on the related idea that the best people don’t need to be managed at all — that strong individual contributors, given a clear vision, will figure out how to get there themselves.
The broader implication for organisations is uncomfortable but worth sitting with: promoting competent administrators into management while keeping the best performers locked in individual contributor roles may be quietly hollowing out a company’s leadership. The person with the title may know how to run a meeting. The person without it may know how to build the thing that matters. Jobs argued — and Apple’s run under his leadership largely demonstrated — that the second type of person, reluctantly elevated, makes for a far better manager than the first.