Inside Apple: How America's Most Admired--and Secretive--Company Really Works (6 page)

I
n his best-selling book
Incognito
, neuroscientist David Eagleman writes about the deleterious impact of a culture of secrecy. “The main thing to know about secrets,” he says, “is that keeping them is unhealthy for the brain.”
People want to tell secrets, he explained, and have a strong natural tendency to do so. Apple solves this problem by keeping its employees in the dark as much as possible. But it also begs the question of the happiness of Apple employees.

By and large, Apple is a collaborative and cooperative environment, devoid of overt politicking. The reason for the cooperation, according to former insiders, is the comhe , is thmand-and-control structure. “Everyone knows that seamless integration between the various parts is key to making the magic happen,” according to Rob Schoeben, a former vice president who oversaw product marketing for software applications. “At Apple, teams work together constantly. Steve will rip your nuts off if you didn’t,” he said while Jobs was still alive. Under Bill Gates, Microsoft had a reputation for being a political infighting nightmare, the implication being that Gates liked the results of the survival-of-the-fittest mentality.

Apple’s culture may be cooperative, but it isn’t usually nice, and it’s almost never relaxed. “When you’re on the campus, you never get the feeling that people are slacking off,” said an observer with access to Apple’s upper ranks. “The fighting can get personal and ugly. There’s a mentality that it’s okay to shred somebody in the spirit of making the best products.” Apple’s high standards come into play. “The pressure to be perfect is the overriding concern,” said one ex-executive. “And it’s hard to be perfect.” Another former insider described the all-too-common stories executives told of having personal time off ruined because of an urgent “Steve request.” “They went like this: ‘On vacation my product was going to be in a keynote, and I had to jump on a plane and rehearse all weekend.’ ”

The competitive nature of the Apple culture comes into play. “Apple is a prizefight every day you go to work,” said Steve Doil, a onetime executive in Apple’s supply-chain organization. “If you’re distracted even a little bit then you slow down the team.” A former executive described the Apple culture in similar terms. “It’s a culture of excellence,” this executive noted. “There’s a sense that you have to play your very best game. You don’t want to be the weak link. There is an intense desire to not let the company down. Everybody has worked so hard and is so dedicated.”

Apple’s culture is the polar opposite of Google’s, where flyers announcing extracurricular activities—from ski outings to a high-profile author series—hang everywhere. At Apple, the iTunes team sponsors the occasional band, and there is a company gym (which isn’t free), but by and large Apple people come to work to work. “At meetings, there is no discussion about the lake house where you just spent the weekend,” recalled a senior engineer. “You get right down to business.” The contrast with the non-Apple world is stark. “When you interact with people at other companies, there’s just a relative lack of intensity,” said this engineer. “At Apple, people are so committed that they go home at night and don’t leave Apple behind them. What they do at Apple is their true religion.”

The attitude toward work at Apple hasn’t changed over the decades. Here’s how Joe Nocera, writing in
Esquire
magazine in 1986, described Jobs’s perspective on the Apple work environment:

He used to talk, for instance, about making Apple an “insanely great” place to work, but he wasn’t talking about irresistible perks or liberal benefits.
Instead, he was talking about creating an environment where you would work harder and longer than you’d ever worked in your life, under the most grinding of deadline pressure, with more responsibility than you ever thought you could handle, never taking vacations, rarely getting even a weekend off… and you wouldn’t care! You’d love it! You’d get to the point where you couldn’t live without the work and the responsibility and the grinding der. grindiadline pressure. All of the people in this room had known such feelings about work—feelings that were exhilarating and personal and even intimate—and they’d known them while working for Steve Jobs. They all shared a private history of their work together at Apple. It was their bond, and no one who was not there could ever fully understand it.

Almost nobody describes working at Apple as being fun. In fact, when asked if Apple is a “fun” place, the responses are remarkably consistent. “People are incredibly passionate about the great stuff they are working on,” said one former employee. “There is not a culture of recognizing and celebrating success. It’s very much about work.” Said another: “If you’re a die-hard Apple geek, it’s magical. It’s also a really tough place to work. You have products that go from inception to launch, which means really late hours.” A third similarly dodged the question: “Because people are so passionate about Apple, they are aligned with the mission of the company.”

If they don’t join for a good time, they also don’t join Apple for the money. Sure Apple has spawned its share of stock-options millionaires—particularly those who had the
good timing to join in the first five or so years after Jobs returned. “You can get paid a lot of money at most places here in the Valley,” said Frederick Van Johnson, the former Apple marketing employee. “Money is not the metric.”

By reputation, Apple pays salaries that are competitive with the marketplace—but no better. A senior director might make an annual salary of $200,000 with bonuses in good years amounting to 50 percent of the base. Talking about money is frowned upon at Apple. “I think working at a company like that, and actually being passionate about making cool things, is cool,” said Johnson, summarizing the ethos. “Sitting in a bar and seeing that 90 percent of the people there are using devices that your company made… there is something cool about that, and you can’t put a dollar value on it.”

Steve Jobs—who was famously uninterested in discussing money—took a nuanced view of the subject of happiness and enjoyment at Apple. “I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t say it’s t
he most fulfilling experience in their lives,” he said. “People love it, which is different than saying they have fun. Fun comes and goes.”

T
ucked away in a walled-off section of the creative studio of Apple’s main marketing building is a room devoted to packaging. Compared with weighty and complex tasks such as software design or hardware manufacturing, packaging would be a pedestrian concern at many companies, almost an afterthought. Not at Apple, which devotes tremendous energy and resources to how it wraps its products. The packaging room is so secure that those with access to it need to badge in and out. To fully grasp how seriously Apple executives sweat the small stuff, consider this: For months, a packaging designer was holed up in this room performing the most mundane of tasks—opening boxes.

Mundane, perhaps, but also critically important. Inside the covert lab were hundreds of iPod box prototypes. That’s right: hundreds of boxes whose sole function was to give the designersayp the ability to experience the moment
when customers picked up and held their new toy for the first time. One after another, the designer created and tested an endless series of arrows, colors, and tapes for a tiny tab designed to show the consumer where to pull back the invisible, full-bleed sticker adhered to the top of the clear iPod box. Getting it just right was this particular designer’s obsession. What’s more, it wasn’t just about one box. The tabs were placed so that when Apple’s factory packed multiple boxes for shipping to retail stores, there was a natural negative space between the boxes that protected and preserved the tab.

How a customer opens a box must be one of the last things a typical product designer would consider. Yet for Apple, the inexpensive box merits as much attention as the high-margin electronic device inside. As the last thing customers see before their greatly anticipated device, Apple’s packages are the capstone to a highly honed and exceedingly expensive process. It begins with prototype design, progresses to a collaboration between supply-chain experts who source the components and product managers who coordinate the assembly of hardware and software, and ends with a coordinated marketing, pricing, and retailing plan to get the devices in consumers’ hands.

Anticipating how the customer will feel holding a simple white box is merely the culmination of many thousands of details Apple will have thought of along the way. “Attention to detail, to me, symbolizes that you really care about the user, all the way through,” said Deep Nishar, an early Google executive who leads user-interface design for the Web company LinkedIn. Nishar described the reverence some of the designers who work for him have for
the box that held their first iPhone. “Do you remember the packaging it came in?” he asked. “Some of them have kept it on their shelves. For the first time in history it was a spring-loaded box. It opened slowly. It continued to evoke that emotion and that feeling of anticipation, that you are about to see something beautiful, something great, something you had been reading about and hearing about, and had watched Steve talk about and demo. That’s the attention to detail, the feeling you want to invoke.”

Obsessing over details and bringing a Buddhist level of focus to a narrow assortment of offerings sets Apple apart from its competitors. Buddhism—a faith Jobs studied intensely—teaches that if you are going to prepare a cup of tea, the making of the cup of tea should command all your attention; even this insignificant task should be completed with all the mastery you can bring to it. It’s a seemingly goofy spiritual idea that can pay great dividends in the corporate world. Well-designed products provide their manufacturers with enviable benefits internally and externally. Internally, talent and resources flow to the products that the company does best.

Externally, good design subliminally telegraphs to consumers that the manufacturer cares about them. This, in turn, creates a bond between brand and consumer that transcends price points.
I can’t wait to get the new iPad
versus
Which is a better deal, a Kindle or a Nook?
So how does Apple use focus to set itself apart when it comes to design, manufacturing, and corporate planning?

Evoking a
feeling
is an extraordinary act for a device maker, let alone a packaging designer working for a device maker. (Try to imagine a Dell laptop evoking a feeling of any kind, other than frustration.) Yet it is what Steve Jobs
did at Apple from the day he started the company. Jobs refused to think ofant to thi Apple’s devices in a conventional way. They weren’t gadgets; they were works of art. “I think the artistry is in having an insight into what one sees around them,” he said in a 1995 interview for the Computerworld Smithsonian Awards Program Oral History Project. Jobs was referring to the people he had hired at Apple in its early days. Their goal, he said, was

putting things together in a way no one else has before and finding a way to express that to other people who don’t have that insight so they can get some of the advantage of that insight that makes them feel a certain way or allows them to do a certain thing. If you study these people a little bit more what you’ll find is that in this particular time, in the 70s and the 80s, the best people in computers would have normally been poets and writers and musicians. Almost all of them were musicians. A lot of them were poets on the side. They went into computers because it was so compelling. It was fresh and new. It was a new medium of expression for their creative talents. The feelings and the passion that people put into it were completely indistinguishable from a poet or a painter.

In retrospect, it seems almost hubristic for Jobs to have compared computer designers—or, heaven forbid,
cardboard-box
designers—to artists. It’s yet another topic that would seem a bit hokey, or even fringe, if the backdrop were some other company. When an approach to creating gadgets enters the cultural zeitgeist, however,
and when awareness of that approach leads to customers snapping up so much product that the company in question blossoms into the most richly valued company in the world, the poetry of consumer electronics rises to the stature of its circuitry.

Apple is different, and what always has set Apple apart is its approach to products. Whether Jobs was describing the typical early Apple employee or merely talking elliptically about himself, Apple fashioned itself early on as a renegade. In the early days, Jobs famously flew a pirate’s skull-and-crossbones banner above the building that housed the Macintosh team, which he oversaw. From the beginning, Apple stood apart from the rest of the computer industry. The ethos at Apple was always about its uniqueness, and attention to detail is part of that ethos.

The computer industry was about standardization. “Clones” of IBM PCs were one of the industry’s great innovations. Apple, with its devotion to superior computers, was briefly an icon, but mostly it was a niche player. Years later, when Hewlett-Packard was enduring one of its many crises, a well-placed Silicon Valley executive reflected on why it would be difficult even for a talented Apple executive to turn HP around. “When Steve came back to Apple morale was terrible, but there remained a culture that understood what it meant to make great products,” this executive said. “HP hasn’t had that in years. There wouldn’t be anyone there to lead.”

The genesis of most Apple products is simply Apple’s desire to make them. Not focus groups. Not reader surveys. Not a competitive analysis. An unwillingness to stick a finger in the wind of customer requirements was one of Steve Jobs’s favorite tropes over the years. “When we first
started Apple we really built the first computer because we wanted one,” he told Michael Moritz in the early 1980s for his book
The Little Kingdom
. It was a line that Jobs repeated over and over for decades. Twenty-five years later he stated, “We really do have the strong belief that we are building pMace buildroducts for ourselves.”