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

themselves to be driven by their interpretation of the answer to that question as opposed todoing what he taught them to do will in no small part determine the future success of the company. Indeed, his absence will put to the test a company culture that Jobs spent his final years attempting to institutionalize. It will take years, but eventually the world will learn if Steve Jobs
was
Apple—or if he succeeded in building a complex organism strong enough to survive his death.

Embrace Secrecy

    A pple employees know something big is afoot when the carpenters appear in their office building. New walls are quickly erected. Doors are added and new security protocols put into place. Windows that once were transparent are now frosted. Other rooms have no windows at all. These are called lockdown rooms: No information goes in or out without a reason.
    As an employee, the hubbub is disconcerting. You quite likely have no idea what is going on, and it’s not like you’re going to ask. If it hasn’t been disclosed to you, then it’s literally none of yourtine business. What’s more, your badge, which got you into particular areas before the new construction, no longer works there. All you can surmise is that a new, highly secretive project is under way, and you are not in the know. End of story.
    Secrecy takes two basic forms at Apple—external and internal. There is the obvious kind, the secrecy that Appleuses as a way of keeping its products and practices hidden from competitors and the rest of the outside world. This cloaking device is the easier of the two types for the rank and file to understand because many companies try to keep their innovations under wraps. Internal secrecy, as evidenced by those mysterious walls and off-limits areas, is tougher to stomach. Yet the link between secrecy and productivity is another way that Apple challenges long-held management truths and the notion of transparency as a corporate virtue.
    All companies have secrets, of course. The difference is that at Apple, everything is a secret. The company understands, by the way, that it takes things a little far, because it has the slightest hint of a sense of humor about its loose-lips-sink-ships mentality: A T-shirt for sale in the company store at 1 Infinite Loop, which is open to the public, reads: I VISITED THE APPLE CAMPUS. BUT THAT’S ALL I’M ALLOWED TO SAY.
    Apple’s airy physical surroundings contradict its secretive core. From above, it appears that an oval football stadium could be plopped down inside Infinite Loop. Yet Apple’s headquarters isn’t visible to the untrained eye. Interstate 280 runs along the north end of campus, but passersby wouldn’t notice it as they sailed by at sixty-five miles an hour. (That wasn’t always the case. In the late 1990s, Apple called attention to itself by hanging giant photographs of the likes of Albert Einstein and Amelia Earhart from the back of IL-3 as part of its “Think Different” campaign.) Visitors to the pulsing center of Apple’s campus can drive around the loop that circles its six central buildings. Parking lots stand across from each of the main buildings, which are connected by walls and fences,forming a closed compound. Through the doors of those buildings, in the core of the loop, is a sunny, green courtyard with volleyball courts, grassy lawns, and outdoor seating for lunch. The splendid central cafeteria, Caffe Macs, features separate stations for fresh sushi, salad, and desserts and teems with Apple employees. They pay for their meals, by the way, unlike at Google, but the food is quite good and reasonably priced. A typical entrée might be grilled halibut on sautéed spinach with sweet potatoes–for $7. Other buildings across Apple’s patchwork of real estate in Cupertino have their own restaurant-quality cafeterias.
    The appearance is collegiate, but good luck auditing a class. Unlike Google’s famously and ridiculously named “Googleplex,” where a visitor can