The speech that told half a team they had failed, in one sentence

When Apple folded its struggling Lisa computer division together with the triumphant Macintosh team in 1984, Steve Jobs stood in front of both groups to explain how the merger would work. He did not soften it. His people, the Macintosh group, would take the top jobs. A quarter of the Lisa staff would be let go. 'You guys failed,' he told them, looking directly at the engineers who had spent years on the project. 'You're a B team. B players. Too many people here are B or C players, so today we are releasing some of you to have the opportunity to work at our sister companies here in the valley.'

Bill Atkinson, who had worked on both the Lisa and the Macintosh, thought it was callous, and unfair besides. 'These people had worked really hard and were brilliant engineers,' he said. But Jobs had drawn what he considered an essential management lesson from building the Mac: excellent people want to work only with other excellent people, and a team that tolerates mediocrity does not stay stable at that level. It slides. 'It's too easy, as a team grows, to put up with a few B players, and they then attract a few more B players, and soon you will even have some C players,' he explained. 'The Macintosh experience taught me that A players like to work only with other A players, which means you can't indulge B players.'

It is worth noticing that this was Jobs's belief, forged from one particular, brutal experience, and not something every leader in the book shared. Steve Wozniak, his cofounder, ran on almost the opposite philosophy. 'Steve was too tough on people,' Wozniak said. 'I wanted our company to feel like a family where we all had fun and shared whatever we made.' Both approaches built parts of the same company. The question the book leaves open is not which philosophy is correct, but which cost you are more willing to pay: the cost of carrying people who are dragging the standard down, or the cost of the fear and hurt that come from a leader who refuses to carry anyone.

Start by naming a quality gap directly to the person or team involved instead of letting it sit unspoken, the way Jobs told an entire division bluntly that they had failed. Understand, as you decide how firm to be, that tolerating one weak performer rarely stays contained, since mediocrity tends to attract more of itself over time. But before you act on that logic, weigh the human cost honestly, because even people who agreed with Jobs's results, like Bill Atkinson, thought the way he delivered this particular judgment was unfair to engineers who had genuinely tried hard. Finally, choose deliberately which trade-off you actually want, a team built purely for top performance or one built for patience and cohesion, since both are real options, and neither one is free.