5
LESSON FOUR
Identify the Warriors
It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they tell us what to do.
—STEVE JOBS
In 1992, York von Heimburg was a brash 35-year-old executive at Markt & Technik, then the largest German IT publisher, when he was recruited by Walter Boyd to join IDG. It took Boyd four meetings over several months to convince the tall, dynamic German to come on board.
“When I hired him, I told Pat that I had just made the biggest find of my career, or I was making a very big mistake,” Boyd recalled. “York was bigger than life and had an answer for everything. You wanted to believe everything he said but he was so self-assured that it was almost off-putting.”
Von Heimburg’s ...
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