• Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said companies need “divas” in order to build brilliant products.
• Schmidt gives the example of Steve Jobs as a difficult yet brilliant diva.
• He distinguishes ‘divas’ from ‘knaves,’ who prioritize personal gain over team success.

Steve Jobs was a diva — and that’s exactly what you want for a successful company, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said.

In a recent episode of “The Diary of A CEO,” Schmidt, who served as the search giant’s chief executive from 2001 to 2011, explained that the key to building a “brilliant product” is finding a “truly brilliant person.”

And it might not be you.

“Find someone who’s just smarter than you, more clever than you, moves faster than you, changes the world,” he said, or “whatever it is that you’re optimizing. And ally yourself with them because they’re the people who are going to make the world different.”

This proposed world-changing character is what he and Google’s former VP of products, Jonathan Rosenberg, describe as a “diva” in their book “How Google Works.”

“Great people are often unusual and difficult,” they wrote, “and some of those quirks can be quite off-putting.”

Although divas view themselves as above their team, their egos are backed by or outweighed by their extreme talent and achievements. One such example of a famously tough genius was Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, who Schmidt said was “clearly” a diva.

“Opinionated and strong and argumentative and would bully people if he didn’t like them, but was brilliant,” he said in the podcast. “He was a diva. He wanted perfection, right? Aligning yourself with Steve Jobs is a good idea.”

Jobs was notorious for his often tyrannical leadership style, from going through temper tantrums to firing people on the spot, but was also undeniably vital for Apple’s slew of successful launches. Schmidt said trying to solve problems in a “really clever way” is what makes divas vital to innovation and, as a result, a continuously advancing company.

“If you don’t have such a person, your company’s not going to go anywhere,” he said. “And the reason is that it’s too easy just to keep doing what you were doing.”

However, the former Google execs made sure to distinguish divas from “knaves,” who are similarly arrogant but prioritize their own success rather than that of the team.

“A knave, which you know from British history, is somebody who’s acting on their own account,” Schmidt said in the podcast. “They’re not trying to do the right thing; they’re trying to benefit themselves at the cost of others.”

Unlike divas, who should be protected despite their eccentricities, Rosenberg and Schmidt wrote that knaves are “sloppy, selfish,” and devoid of integrity and must be swiftly dealt with.

“Knavish behavior is a product of low integrity,” they wrote, “diva-ish behavior is one of high exceptionalism.”