TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

To end his biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson printed an extended excerpt of what Jobs said during their interviews. This section, if you haven’t read it already, is worth the price of the book alone. I don’t want to quote too much from it (yet), because some of it is very insightful both into how Jobs operated Apple and his own personal motivations and ruining it for you all just isn’t kosher, but I did want to talk about something he said at the beginning. Jobs said,

My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary. Sure, it was great to make a profit, because that was what allowed you to make great products. But the products, not the profits, were the motivation. Sculley flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money. It’s a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything: the people you hire, who gets promoted, what you discuss in meetings.

When I first read that, I didn’t think too much of it, because that’s something we’ve heard all along from Jobs, and the idea that profit is a means, not an ends, is pure Drucker. But half way into the next paragraph, I stopped and went back and re-read it.

What struck me were the last two sentences. What Jobs is saying is that not only does focusing on the product make for better products, but it completely changes the corporate, business and organizational decisions you make, too. If you are focused on maximizing profit (in the short or long-term), you end up making choices that inhibit great products and great success at best, and destroy your ability to succeed at worst.

Your goals and priorities define who you are and what decisions you make. If your overriding priority is maximizing profit, that means what the company does—the products it creates, the change in society that results, the experience customers have—is all a means to making money. And if that’s the case, sacrificing your product’s integrity to squeeze out a bit more profit is a decision you’ll make every time. If, for a new product, you have to choose between a really great design that will just delight customers but that’s much harder and more expensive to make, and a merely good design that’s cheaper to produce and less of a challenge, you won’t blink. You choose the easier one; for you, it’s the pragmatic choice. It’s good enough for customers, and it’s much easier (and cheaper) for you to produce, which means less investment in development and higher margins.

But if you, as management, are willing to sacrifice the product for profit, that changes your organization. Everyone knows what’s prioritized, so they’ll make the same decisions, too. Why should your design team pour every ounce of themselves into building the best product they can, if that isn’t what management wants? Why should someone who isn’t even directly involved with the product sit around and think about how they could be better, and make sure they tell their idea to the right person? Why should anyone in the company put their absolute best effort into everything they do, when “excellence” is defined by management as a 5 percent decrease in cost of goods sold, rather than the new idea that makes it obvious to everyone they have to stop all work on a new project and start over, because this new idea is just so clearly right? Why would anyone take personal responsibility and say that what someone else is doing is shit and it needs to be done this way?

No one will, because what kind of company you have is defined at the top. You might have the finest people in the industry, but if the culture doesn’t demand excellence, you won’t get it. And worse, as Jobs argues, this becomes self-reinforcing: instead of hiring people whose obsession is creating the best product they possibly can, you’ll start hiring people who are good at increasing sales of an existing product, decreasing costs and improving efficiency—people whose motivations are running a business or furthering their career, instead of building things. Then that feedback loop will keep on going; other people who are there to build things will either give up and submit to the new culture or leave, and you’ll hire even more similarly-minded people, until that’s all there is, and you’re left with a company that can’t do anything meaningful.

Jobs said that one of his primary tasks was to make sure that only “A” people were hired, and when he finds someone that isn’t up to that standard in the company, they are fired. That sounds cruel, but it’s necessary, because if you don’t pursue that rule without mercy, that feedback loop is difficult to reverse.

The only way to even do that, though, is to have the right values. Your most deeply-held motivation must be to make the best product you can possibly make, because you care about it. Because you want the best product. When that’s what has your heart—you think about it all day, and you find your mind wandering to it when you’re watching a movie or falling asleep—then you’ll only hire people who are talented and have that same excited look in their eye when they get to explain some new project they’re working on. You’ll make the tough decision to enter a new business that could cannibalize your existing business, because you just know it’s going to be something great. You’ll demand everyone’s best work and won’t accept half-assed effort, because dammit, we can do better. And even better, your employees will pour themselves into their work, will be their own worst critic, because that’s how things are done there. Inter-division politics and bullshit conflicts will drop away when everyone’s focused on creating the best damned thing they possibly can.

It isn’t a magic balm that, when applied to a company, will suddenly make it super-creative and effective. The primary reason for that, of course, is it’s so rare; management can make a thousand mission statements and speeches telling everyone how everything they do is about the product, but in most cases, that’s corporate bullshit talk, and everyone can see through it in a second. You have to really believe it. But even when you really do believe it, it’s a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for creating that kind of company. You have to have smart strategy and execute, too, not just feel fuzzy feelings about your products.

But your motivation is the beginning of a great, and lasting, company. Without it, your company will never be truly transformative. With it, you can change the world. You have to look at your company as a tool for making something truly meaningful and sublime and beautiful. Business is a paintbrush for making the most inspiring art we’ve ever seen.