Hiring Smart People and Empowering Their Decisions

Steve Jobs once said, “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.” This quote has become a cornerstone of how we think about building teams at Sagebrush.

The Power of Intelligent Autonomy

When you hire truly smart people, micromanagement becomes not just counterproductive—it becomes insulting. Smart people don’t need to be told how to do their jobs; they need to be given the context, resources, and freedom to figure out the best path forward.

At Sagebrush, we’ve taken this philosophy to heart. We don’t hire people to execute our predetermined plans. We hire people who can look at a problem, understand the constraints and objectives, and come back to us with solutions we never would have considered.

Embracing Contentious Debate

This approach naturally leads to what some might see as uncomfortable territory: contentious and lively debate. We actively encourage this at Sagebrush because we’ve learned that the best ideas often emerge from the friction between different perspectives.

When smart people feel empowered to challenge assumptions—including ours—magic happens. They push back on strategies that don’t make sense. They identify blind spots we missed. They propose alternative approaches that are often superior to our initial thinking.

This isn’t about creating conflict for its own sake. It’s about creating an environment where the best ideas win, regardless of whose they are or where they sit in the organizational hierarchy.

Following Amazon’s Written Culture

To complement this philosophy of empowering smart people, we’ve adopted many of Amazon’s principles, particularly their emphasis on written culture. When decisions need to be made, we encourage our team to write them down—not just the conclusions, but the reasoning, the alternatives considered, and the trade-offs involved.

This written approach serves several purposes:

• Clarity: Writing forces you to think through your ideas more completely

• Accessibility: Others can understand and build upon your thinking

• Accountability: Decisions and their rationale are preserved for future reference

• Inclusion: It gives everyone, including introverts and remote team members, equal opportunity to contribute

Driving Their Own Decisions

The ultimate goal is to create an environment where smart people can drive their own decisions within appropriate guardrails. We provide the strategic context, the constraints, and the support—then we get out of the way.

This doesn’t mean chaos or lack of coordination. It means trusting that the people we’ve hired are capable of making good decisions when they have the right information and clear understanding of what success looks like.

The Results Speak for Themselves

When you combine hiring smart people with empowering them to make decisions, encouraging healthy debate, and maintaining a culture of written communication, something remarkable happens: you get better outcomes than any single person could have achieved alone.

The solutions that emerge are more creative, more robust, and more thoroughly considered. The team becomes more invested in the results because they’re not just executing someone else’s plan—they’re implementing solutions they helped create.

At Sagebrush, we’ve found that this approach doesn’t just lead to better business outcomes. It creates a more engaging, fulfilling work environment where smart people want to stay and do their best work.