Q. Tell me about the best bosses you worked for.

A. My boss in the jewelry business was great because he taught me how to sell and how a business reputation was built on trust.

My boss at Apple was a guy named Mike Murray, who was the director of marketing of the Macintosh division. He gave me so much rope that I could hang myself and sometimes I did. After a while, your neck gets stronger and you also learn not to hang yourself.

A few levels above me, I learned from Steve Jobs that people can change the world. Maybe we didn’t get 95 percent market share, but we did make the world a better place. I learned from Steve that some things need to be believed to be seen. These are powerful lessons — very different from saying we just want to eke out an existence and keep our heads down.

Q. So how do you create a sense of mission in a company?

A. The foundation is the desire to make meaning in the world — to make the world a better place. We believed in the Mac division that we were making the world a better place by making people more creative and productive. Google, at its core, probably believes it’s making the world a better place by democratizing information. So it starts from this core of how you make meaning, which translates into some kind of physical product or service that actually delivers.

Q. How do you hire?

A. The most important thing is that you hire people who complement you and are better than you in specific areas. Good people hire people better than themselves. So A players hire A+ players. But others hire below their skills to make themselves look good. So B players hire C players. C players hire D players, etc.

Time and again in Silicon Valley, two engineers who are the founders of a company have a very unique perspective. They believe that engineering is hard, and everything else is easy. Sales, marketing, finance, operations, manufacturing — all that is easy.

With this perspective, they think that if they set their mind to it, they could be the best V.P. of manufacturing, best V.P. of finance, best V.P. of marketing, best V.P. of sales, best V.P. of everything.