Eric Schmidt: evaluation

Transcript context

…So you then moved on to Sun Microsystems. You worked with Scott McNealy. What’s the most important thing you learned from him? Well Scott was a very strong leader, and Scott was a person of great charisma. He’s now retired. And what I learned about . . . I’ll give an example: The first month I was in the company, the products didn’t work at all, which is characteristic of most of the first year of the company. It was because at the time we were doing breadboarding, and we would do wires to the computers, and so forth, and nothing ever worked. I know it’s hard to imagine, but this is what the state of the computers were. I remember one evening, Scott gave this impassioned speech that we would all stay overnight in order to get enough hardware built so that we could make the quarter. I was shocked that people actually did this. And what I realized is that charismatic leaders can get people to do stuff that they would otherwise not rationally do, but because we were a team and because we believed in our mission, right at the time — these were work stations and we were battling the man in the sense that we were battling the older generation of computers — somehow we were motivated to do this. That motivation works and it works today. You’ve said that praise is underused and underappreciated as a management tool. Why is it you think other CEOs don’t understand the importance of praise?…

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