When asked by a Wall Street analyst how Apple’s planning process works, its CEO Tim Cook replied, “I don’t want to let anybody know our magic because I don’t want anybody copying it.”
Cook summed up one of the great paradoxes of business. Apple’s products and its late co-founder, Steve Jobs, are indeed famous around the globe, but little is known about what actually transpires inside Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California.
That is until now.
INSIDE APPLE: How America’s Most Admired—and Secretive—Company Really Works reveals what Apple executives call the “secret sauce,” namely the systems, tactics and management strategies that allowed Jobs and his company to churn out hit after hit and to inspire a cult-like following for its Macs, iPods, iPhones and iPads.
Adam Lashinsky, one of the leading journalists covering Silicon Valley, takes us behind closed doors to explore the secret and paradoxical ways that Apple operates and how it may fare without its longtime leader Steve Jobs. Is it possible or even sensible, he asks, for the rest of us to try to approximate the methods that led to its greatness but which fly in the face of what’s taught in business school?
Lashinsky introduces readers to such little known Apple practices as:
· Apple University, the management training program Steve Jobs started within the company by hiring away the dean of the Yale School of Management
· The “DRI” (a Directly Responsible Individual for every task) and other unconventional top-down management techniques
· The Top 100 (a semi-annual ritual in which 100 up-and-coming executives are plucked for a secret offsite and where such innovations as the iPad and the first Apple retail store were first revealed).
· An unwritten caste system that supplanted the traditional org chart
· A system of secrecy structured not unlike the cells of a terrorist organization and where walls of off-limits lockdown rooms may get erected around your office for the next secret project
· A recruiting process which might start a new hire in a “dummy position” long before they’re told what they’ve been hired to work on.
· A “confrontational” workplace culture which a source described as “at each other’s throats”
· Specific techniques it uses to maintain the vibrancy of a small startup when in fact it is nearly the world’s largest company by market capitalization.
“This book is an attempt to hack into Apple’s closed world and to decode its secret systems so that aspiring entrepreneurs, curious middle managers, envious rival CEOs, and creatives who dream of turning insights into inventions can understand the company’s processes and customs,” writes Lashinsky.
With behind-the-scenes reportage, each chapter uncovers Apple’s secrets to leadership, design, branding, innovation, decision making, competition and how the company is changing under its new CEO, Tim Cook. INSIDE APPLE should appeal to anyone hoping to bring some of Apple’s magic to his own company, career, or creative endeavor.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Adam Lashinsky is a Senior Editor at Large for Fortune Magazine, where he covers technology and finance. He is also a Fox News contributor and frequent speaker and moderator. Prior to joining Fortune, Lashinsky was a columnist for TheStreet.com and the San Jose Mercury News. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and daughter.
