Culture, leadership, and attitude in general say a lot about what you are paying people for.

It usually is a mix of doing and thinking. That is a combination of knowing what is expected of them and transforming it into actions. In essence, it is doing what is expected of them that people are being paid for.

Steve Jobs had a different take on this. He favored paying people to tell him and the organization what to do. Naturally, this isn’t to be understood literally. There still is the need to make sense of the diversity of opinions and ideas one is being told to implement. The way this can happen is by considering them all as valid and yet staying aware of how they fit into the overarching project.

Neither telling others what to do nor letting others tell oneself what to do are easy. And yet both are needed. Settling for one of them reduces one’s ability to develop a vision others can follow.