According to Mercury News reports, Nolan Bushnell stats he always saw something special in Steve Jobs. Bushnell is the owner of video game pioneer Atari and he was also the first boss of Jobs in 1970s. It was the time when Steve applied in Atari at the age of 19 but was rejected by most of the organization because of his off-the-beaten nature. During his interview, Bushnell says “The truth is that very few companies would like Steve, even today. The reason is he was an outlier. For most potential employers, he’d just seem like a jerk in bad clothing.”
On the other hand Bushnell doesn’t hesitate accepting that regardless of the fact he rejected Steve, he respect his way of working and trying to make his organization the way Steve would have made it. For this reason, he allowed employees to turn the office into a cross between a video game arcade and the Amazon Jungle. There are keg parties and live bands for the employees, and employees are free to take naps during their shifts. He considers that taking short naps during shifts will improve the creativity of them when they were awake. He also promised a summer sabbatical every seven years.
Bushnell’s newly released book “Finding the Next Steve Jobs: How to Find, Hire, Keep and Nurture Creative Talent” pays more emphasize on making the employees as creative as possible, instead of making the workplace a mind-numbing bureaucracy. The basic deeds mentioned in the book are: make work fun, week out the naysayers, celebrate failure and learn from it and allow employees to take short naps while working. It also gives a considerable emphasize on hiring process that the employers should not feel hesitated in hiring talented people just because the look sloppy or failed to make good college credentials.
Bushnell also agrees that there are thousands of creative and unconventional people out there working at various organizations. The problem is, most of the employers or managers fail in recognizing them. And even if they do, they push them to comfort rather than create. “Some of the best projects to ever come out of Atari or Chuck E. Cheese’s were from high school dropouts, college dropouts,” says Bushnell, “One guy had been in jail.”
