Jon McNeill

We weren't leading the curiosity or the discovery or whatever.

And so that's the trap that you're trying to like dive into so deeply in the problem that you start to determine, did this person actually do the work or not?

And it's tricky because there are companies that are fully matrixed.

So take like Nike.

Nike's a fully matrixed organization.

You pull a marketer out of Nike, that marketer has never had a full P&L responsibility, full creative responsibility, full distribution responsibility.

They have a very niche job and it's really hard to determine, did this person do the work or not?

And so you go way deep on trying to figure that out, knowing that it's a risky hire to hire from a matrix like that, because you really can't put your finger on who really does the breakthrough work.

That's one.

The second is, I would present a, much like Elon did with me, I'd flip the tables and present a current problem of mine.

And then I want to see their level of curiosity, their level of analytics, their level of problem solving, their ability to ask really great questions, to get some data from me and get me engaged.

And so it's basically, it's that basic.

Like go into a problem of theirs, then flip the table and go into a problem of yours.

And that's the knack of Tesla.

It was like, let's turn complex into simple.

And so if you've been a leader there, you can identify these leaders because...

they have the ability within a minute or two to take a really complex question and boil it down into principle.

I 100% agree with that.

Like our head of retail came to me and he said, hey, I'm hiring a lot of Apple people from Apple stores.

And I said, time out.