Divas Not Knaves
Ally yourself with the brilliant, difficult person who wants the product perfect — and screen out the self-server
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 91%
Schmidt's first rule of building anything great is that a truly brilliant person is required to build a truly brilliant product, and it is probably not you. His job was to find that person and ally with them. He distinguishes two kinds of strong personality: the diva, exemplified by Steve Jobs — opinionated, argumentative, sometimes a bully, but wanting perfection in the product — and the knave, who is acting on their own account and benefiting themselves at the cost of others. Divas move the world forward; knaves look similar from the outside and destroy teams.
Origin
Schmidt developed the diva-versus-knave distinction in one of his books, and applied it across Sun, Apple's board and twenty years alongside Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google.
Core principles
- 01Find someone smarter, faster and more world-changing than you, and ally with them.
- 02A diva's difficulty is in service of the product; a knave's is in service of themselves.
- 03Without such a person, a company defaults to doing what it already does.
- 04Innovation is fundamentally about changing what you are doing, which requires someone willing to fight for it.
How to run it
- 1
Accept you are not the brilliant one
Assume the product genius is someone else and make your job finding and enabling them.
Pro tip Schmidt was explicit: 'that is not me, I work with them'.
- 2
Identify the diva
Look for the person who is passionate about solving the problem in a genuinely clever way and wants it perfect, even if they are abrasive.
Pro tip Steve Jobs is the archetype — argumentative and demanding, but pointed entirely at perfection.
- 3
Screen out the knave
Filter for people acting on their own account, who are optimising personal benefit at the cost of others rather than trying to solve the problem.
Watch out Knaves and divas both present as strong and opinionated — the test is who the intensity serves.
- 4
Give them ownership
Put the identified person in charge of the thing; Larry Page insisted nothing happens without a named owner driving it.
Pro tip Sundar Pichai's founder strength was identifying that technical owner and letting them run.
Watch out Without an owner, big-company innovation stalls no matter how good the idea.
In the wild
Schmidt and Larry Page spent a session building a long strategy list on a whiteboard; Sergey ran in sweating from volleyball, called it the stupidest thing he had ever heard, suggested five things, and went back to the game.
→ They erased the whiteboard and Sergey's five things became the strategy of the company.
Jobs was opinionated, strong, argumentative and would bully people he disliked, but was uncompromising about perfection in the product.
→ Schmidt's verdict: aligning yourself with Steve Jobs was a good idea.
Common mistakes
Mistaking a knave for a diva
Both are forceful and hard to manage, but the knave is optimising for themselves at others' expense and will not move the product or the company forward.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders and executives assembling a leadership team around a genuinely new product.
Not ideal for
Organisations that need process stability more than invention, where a diva's disruption costs more than it creates.
From the transcript
“you need a truly brilliant person to build a really brilliant product and that is not me I work with them”
“if you can identify a person in one of these teams that they're just trying to solve the problem in a really clever way and…”
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Eric Schmidt