Inside Apple: How America's Most Admired--and Secretive--Company Really Works Read Online Free PDF

perceived beat of a charismatic leader who was omnipresent. Said another former executive who joined Apple in an acquisition and stayed on for a while: “You can ask anyone in the company what Steve wants and you’ll get an answer, even if 90 percent of them have never met Steve.”
    A pple employees liked to tell “Steve stories,” such as tremulous rides in the elevator with him or staying out of his way if he appeared in the company cafeteria. Jobs himself used storytelling masterfully, and for years he used a parable—again, kind of like that other guy who “changed the world”—to drive home the message of accountability at Apple. According to more than one account, Jobs made a habit of delivering his parable to newly named vice presidents at Apple. Jobs would launch into a faux dialogue between himself and the janitor who cleans his office.
    The scene begins with Jobs discovering an awkward situation whereby the waste bin in his office at Apple repeatedly is going unemptied. One day he happens to be working late and he directly confronts the janitor. “Why isn’t my garbage being emptied,” asks the powerful CEO. “Well, Mr. Jobs,” replies the janitor, whose voice is quivering, “the locks have been changed and nobody gave me the new key.” In his acting-out of the parable, Jobs is relieved to know there is an explanation to the mystery of his rotting trash and that there is an easy solution as well: Get the man a key.
    At this point in his lesson, Jobs would shift to the moral that the newly minted VP—or, on occasion, a VP who needs to be reminded—was meant to take away from the parable. “When you’re the jant,’re tnitor,” Jobs would continue, now speaking directly to the executive, not theatrically to a fictional janitor, “reasons matter. Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO reasons stop mattering, and that Rubicon is crossed when you become a VP.” Jobs made a practice of noting that if Apple were to repeatedly turn in a poor financial performance—it hadn’t happened in years, of course—he would take the heat from Wall Street. VPs in turn would take the heat from him if their performance suffered. Finally, invoking Yoda from
Star Wars
, Jobs would tell the VP: “Do or do not. There is no try.”
    How long the deceased narcissistic co-founder, longtime CEO, and pervasive presence at Apple could continue to influence the corporate culture at Apple was Topic A among the media in the wake of Jobs’s death. “Some of me is in the DNA of the company. But single-cell organisms aren’t that interesting,” Jobs said months before his death. “Apple is a complex multi-cellular organism.” The whole look and feel of the company and its products reflect his personal aesthetic: simple, even austere, witty at times, and brutally efficient. But can an organization survive without its narcissistic driving force? Maccoby gives examples of companies that foundered, including Disney after Walt’s death, and others that thrived, like IBM after the Watson family no longer ran it.
    Two lines of inquiry address the dilemma of the indispensability of Steve Jobs. One is to look at what happened at Disney when the founder passed away (which I do in chapter 8). The other (which I’ll look at in greater detail in chapter 9) is to see how Apple alumni who have left to start their own companies are faring.
    Disney is an instructive example in pondering the influence Steve Jobs will continue to exert at Apple from his grave. In the years after his death, Disney execs were known to ask, “What would Walt do?” His office remained untouched for years, and in 1984, when Michael Eisner arrived as Disney’s new chief executive, Walt’s secretary was still on the job. Given the ubiquity of Jobs’s presence at Apple when he was CEO, it’s impossible to imagine that “What would Steve do?” won’t be an oft-repeated phrase at Apple for quite some time. The degree to which Apple executives allow