Inside Apple: How America's Most Admired--and Secretive--Company Really Works by Adam Lashinsky

Ive’s dreamy insistence on a stainless-steel bezel for iPhones and industrial-grade glass for iPads, for instance, paid off in a way that managers worried about making a budget never could have achieved. If he were handcuffed to a spreadsheet, would Ive have insisted that the Italian marble being considered for Apple’s first Manhattan retail store be flown to Cupertino for him to inspect?
    The very concept of general management—the notion of promoting well-rounded, left-brain/right-brain types who can toggle from real estate to supply chain to marketing to finance—constitutes an organizational third rail at Apple. This approach contradicts about a century ofbusiness school teaching in the industrialized world, particularly the general-management concepts taught in the post–World War II era at the Harvard Business School. Befitting his bias toward the vibe of a start-up, Jobs was long disdainful of general management. While building Apple in the 1980s, he denigrated big companies such as Polaroid and Xerox for having lost their way. “Companies, as they grow to become multi-billion-dollar entities, somehow lose their vision,” he told
Playboy
in 1985. “They insert lots of layers of middle management between the people running the company and the people doing the work. They no longer have an inherent feel or passion about the products. The creative people, who are the ones who care passionately, have to persuade five layers of management to do what they know is the right thing to do.”
    When Jobs returned to Apple, he was disgusted to find that it had become one of those companies he had disparaged a decade earlier. “What was wrong with Apple wasn’t individual contributors,” he said. “We had to get rid of about four thousand middle managers. Good technical people stepped up to become managers.” Jobs was well aware that Apple’s approach stood apart. “The way you grow at Apple is not the same as at GE,” he said. “We don’t send you on assignment to the Congo. We don’t have this notion that a manager can manage anything.”
    The Apple approach to management and talent development is top-down. It begins with an all-knowing CEO aided by a powerful executive team—the “ET,” as it is known throughout the company. “The purpose of the executive team is to coordinate things and set the tone for the company,” Jobs once said. This ten-member group,including the CEO, comprises the heads of product marketing, hardware and software engineering, operations, retail stores, Internet services, and design, all of whom directly have a hand in Apple’s products. They’re joined by the heads of finance and legal.
    The executive team meets each Monday, with the main action items being a review of Apple’s product plans. It may seem like a typical corporate function, but it’s unusual in the depth of the attention paid to the granular aspects of product development. Because Apple has so few products, the executive team is able to review all of them over the course of two weekly meetings. The company may be top-down, but the executive-team format engenders a system of managing up. Teams throughout the company are in a constant state of preparing their boss or their boss’s boss to present at an executive-team meeting. Indeed, individual groups throughout the company have their own meetings to prepare for the ET and other top-level meetings. (When he ran operations, Tim Cook convened his pre-ET meeting by telephone on Sunday nights.) “Everybody is working toward these Monday presentations,” said Andrew Borovsky, a former Apple designer. “There is executive review of every significant project.”
    Adherence to this communicate-up/manage-down system explains Apple’s speed and clarity of decision making. “You’re never out of a two-week decision loop,” said one former hardware executive. (Jobs said that if a product discussion wasn’t finished one week, it would be added to the following