Steve Jobs, in his last interview with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at the All Things Digital’s D8 Conference in 2010. Steve died a year later.

We’re organized like a start up. We’re the biggest startup on the planet. There’s tremendous teamwork at the top of the company, which filters down to tremendous teamwork throughout the company. Teamwork is dependent on trusting the other folks to come through with their part without watching them all the time, but trusting they’re going to come through with their parts. That’s what we do really well.

If you wanna hire great people and have them stay working for you, you have to let them make a lot of decisions and you have to be run by ideas not hierarchy. The best ideas have to win, otherwise good people don’t stay.

This interview has many great highlights, but this part is some of my favorite advice Steve has ever given about how to run a company. We strive to achieve this at Changelog.

Here’s a link to the full video, and the same but deep linked to the part quoted in this post.