Success Quote by Scott McNealy

In Scott McNealy's world, talent is only the down payment; the mortgage is discipline. "Get the best people and train them well" is executive pragmatism stripped of romance, a two-part command that treats culture like infrastructure: you build it, you maintain it, or it collapses under scale.

The first clause signals a ruthless hiring philosophy typical of Silicon Valley in its growth-phase swagger: scarcity thinking, where the market for exceptional engineers and operators is a competitive battlefield. "Best" isn’t a feel-good adjective here; it’s a proxy for speed, adaptability, and the ability to survive ambiguity. The subtext: average performers don’t just slow you down, they create drag that spreads through an organization, forcing processes to compensate for weakness.

The second clause is the more revealing one. McNealy isn’t arguing for genius-as-magic; he’s arguing for talent-as-raw-material. Training is not an HR perk, it’s a managerial obligation and a control system. It implies that even top hires arrive unfinished and that a company’s advantage comes from how quickly it can turn individual excellence into coordinated execution. In the Sun Microsystems era, when enterprise tech was a marathon of shipping, servicing, and iterating, this was survival logic: products commoditize, competitors copy, but a well-trained team can outrun the churn.

There’s also a quiet rebuke to the startup myth of hiring "rockstars" and letting them freestyle. McNealy’s line insists that elite people still need a playbook, and leaders are responsible for writing it.