What Steve Jobs Learned from The Beatles: A Leadership Lesson
- Aug 21, 2025
- 3 min read
“Hire great people and then get out of their way” – Steve Jobs
I’ve seen this quote and the reference to Steve Jobs many times. The problem? Jobs never said it.
What he did say, in a 1995 interview, was this — “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”
Wait, isn’t this the same thing? Not the way Jobs meant it.
A similar quote came from a 1992 MIT lecture that Jobs gave — “We’re paying people to tell us what to do. I don’t view that we’re paying people to do things.” In this same lecture, Jobs made it clear that after hiring smart people he didn’t just “get out of their way." He meant building a team where every smart person was expected to contribute and where decisions only moved forward when there was true alignment. But people have time and time again misconstrued this quote as “hire great people and then get out of the way.”
What’s funny is that after I listened to this lecture, I also thought about the parallels with The Beatles and how they operated as a band. As I dug a little more, I learned why. Jobs was very influenced by The Beatles. Here is a quote from one of his interviews:
“My model for business is The Beatles. They were four very talented guys who kept each other’s negative tendencies in check; they balanced each other. The total was greater than the sum of the parts.”
Let me break down the philosophies of Jobs and The Beatles to detail the many parallels.
How to run a business – Steve Jobs
He believed in hiring A-players and then working with them as peers, not as command-and-control subordinates. A-players also self-police themselves and each other, meaning there is less to manage with them.
This reflected his belief in small teams of A-players all rowing in the same direction, toward a common vision.
His model was collaborative contribution, not “step aside and let them run it.”
Jobs disliked “professional managers,” he even called them “Bozos.” He wanted collaborative A-players contributing and building something bigger together than they could build individually.
In that 1992 lecture, he emphasized that Apple’s leadership required consensus before moving forward — meaning every smart person wasn’t just there to execute but to shape decisions.
He said that when tackling a big decision, the executive team had to agree unanimously before moving forward.
His reasoning: if the smartest people in the room weren’t aligned, then the idea wasn’t ready — and forcing it through would just create friction.
Jobs wanted a creative dialogue where each smart hire influenced direction, not just did tasks.
How to run a band – The Beatles
They were four A-players.
Before Ringo Starr joined the Beatles, they already had a pretty good drummer in Pete Best. But Pete was a B-Player, and Ringo was an A-player. They didn’t settle, and the rest is history.
They had the “four votes” rule — no major decision moved ahead unless all four agreed. They wanted consensus on decisions made about recording or touring.
Each bandmate was expected to contribute creatively on every album, even if one was the dominant songwriter at the time.
Paul McCartney once said: “We were four equal parts. If anyone didn’t want to do something, we didn’t do it.”
Every member’s voice mattered and was expected to bring something to the table — contribution was mandatory, not optional.
In both philosophies, the result was the same: collaboration, contribution, and consensus created something greater than any one individual could achieve alone. Both Jobs and The Beatles produced some of the biggest contributions to society in technology and music, so maybe they were on to something. Success leaves clues.
Now I know it’s easy just to say “hire A-players and start collaborating,” but the reality is not everyone is an A-player and organizations should always be managing people up or out. An A-player today may not be one tomorrow, and a B or C player doesn’t have to stay that way. You must constantly work to recruit, build, and maintain A-players, as well as a culture of contribution, collaboration, creativity, and consensus.
While you may never fully get there — or stay there — the constant pursuit of the philosophies Steve Jobs and The Beatles lived by will take your team to a whole new level.
