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

week’s agenda.) “Young engineers know their work gets presented. They know their work matters.”They also know debate will not be endless. “Someone once said to me, ‘I didn’t always agree, but I knew there was going to be a decision,’ ” noted this same engineer.
    The weekly top-level product review also serves as a kind of graduate seminar for executives below the level of the executive team. As executives added more responsibility, Jobs would invite them to attend portions of the ET meetings, then more and then more still.
    The speediness of Apple’s decision making also is aided by how judiciously information is communicated outside the executive team. Typically, more information goes in than goes out. Apple teams are given swift feedback—but only the feedback they are deemed to need. The need-to-know mentality explains all the cordoned-off secret rooms with restrictive badge access. By selectively keeping some employees from concerning themselves with colleagues elsewhere in a giant company, Apple creates the illusion that these employees in fact don’t work for a giant company. They work for a start-up. “Some of it is theater, some of it is paranoia,” said a former Apple engineer. But it’s also done with a purpose. “They are isolating themselves from everything that is bad about a big company.”
    The original iPhone team, for example, didn’t interact with the people working on the iPod, then the dominant and fastest-growing product at Apple. The iPhone organization was allowed to raid the iPod group and other areas of the company for engineering talent. That’s because the iPhone was a corporate priority, driven from the top. “A big company would have worried about cannibalizing the iPod,” said an observeThed an obr who knew executives in both groups. “There would have been culturaland technical tension.” Effects of any tension were minimized at Apple because the two groups didn’t talk. The start-up team could pretend it didn’t have the baggage of a big corporation.
    P ut these corporate attributes together—clear direction, individual accountability, a sense of urgency, constant feedback, clarity of mission—and you begin to have a sense of Apple’s values.
Values
may be a squishy topic in the corporate world, a term that’s interchangeable with
culture
or
core beliefs
. In the case of Apple, however, being able to assess how deeply ingrained its values are informs the question of how the company will fare without Steve Jobs. After all, Jobs himself agonized over the drift in Apple’s values during the ten-plus years he was in the wilderness at NeXT and Pixar. “What ruined Apple wasn’t growth,” he said in a 1995 interview with the Smithsonian Institution, as he watched his beloved brainchild flailing. “What ruined Apple was values. John Sculley ruined Apple and he ruined it by bringing a set of values to the top of Apple which were corrupt and corrupted some of the top people who were there, drove out some of the ones who were not corruptible, and brought in more corrupt ones and paid themselves collectively tens of millions of dollars and cared more about their own glory and wealth than they did about what built Apple in the first place, which was making great computers for people to use.” (In 2011, Sculley first declined to comment on Jobs’s decade-old comments, and then followed up to cite his accomplishments at Apple, including helping to usher in the Macintosh. It’s worth noting that
corrupt
was a favorite pejorative for Jobs. He generally used it to describe his opinion of the wrong way of doing things, as opposed to implying illegal wrongdoing.)
    If Jobs thought the leadership during the interregnum obsessed about money, the modern obsession with user experience has created a kind of shorthand for how Apple employees communicate. “There’s a passion about the place,” said a former top engineering executive. “You interact with people at other