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

companies who just aren’t connected. They are floating above the strategy. You try explaining to them what not to do, and it’s like talking to people in a language they don’t understand. At Apple, thirteen of fifteen topics get cut off after a sentence of discussion. That’s all that’s needed.”
    The Apple way is direct and deadline-oriented. “Dates are set well in advance,” said Mike Janes, who ran Apple’s online store in the early 2000s. “Things get accomplished. There are no questions. The ‘Innovator’s Dilemma’ doesn’t exist at Apple,” he said, referring to Clay Christensen’s popular book about how big companies fail to anticipate the next wave because they are unwilling to sacrifice existing sales. “There’s no dilemma.” As for urgency, “If you want to get something done, the meeting is this afternoon. Or tomorrow. You don’t wait to get something on the calendar.”
    For such a sprawling organization, Apple also is a headquarters-centric company. Sure, there are sales offices and retail stores throughout the world. And Apple has established China as its base of manufacturing. But its entire management team is based in Cupertino and talks to one another, frequently and in person. The small number of vice presidents, typically reporting directly to members of the executive team, means that the CEO can seethe entire company with one degree of separation. Apple people board airplanes at the drop of a hat, but the compegnbut theany does not have a videoconferencing or conference-call culture. Meetings generally happen in Cupertino.
    Moreover, there’s a sense that only people in Cupertino are truly to be trusted. Bob Borchers, the former iPhone product marketing executive, recalled the decision to fly more than forty people from headquarters to Europe for the iPhone launch in the United Kingdom and Germany. “It was Cupertino staff, the folks who’d been part of the launch at Macworld, who had already been through it,” he said, referring to the iPhone’s debut in 2007 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. “So rather than trying to train somebody, even somebody in the regional office, we said, ‘No, let’s take the people who have done this before. Let’s fly them over.’ We essentially shut down all of product marketing for a week.”
    I n a company organized along functional rather than divisional lines, scouting must be a core competency of its leader. Steve Jobs long considered the issue of spotting and grooming talent to be one of the most important aspects of being an entrepreneur and a CEO. It was particularly on his mind in 1995, a decade after being pushed aside at Apple and two years before his return. Listen to how, in the Smithsonian interview, he discussed the relative numerical value of people in the way a hedge-fund manager might discuss leverage.

I always considered part of my job was to keep the quality level of people in the organizations I workwith very high. That’s what I consider one of the few things I actually can contribute individually—to really try to instill in the organization the goal of only having “A” players. Because in this field, like in a lot of fields, the difference between the worst taxicab driver and the best taxicab driver to get you cross-town Manhattan might be two to one. The best one will get you there in fifteen minutes, the worst one will get you there in a half an hour. Or the best cook and the worst cook, maybe it’s three to one. Pick something like that. In the field that I’m in the difference between the best person and the worst person is about a hundred to one or more. The difference between a good software person and a great software person is fifty to one, twenty-five to fifty to one, huge dynamic range. Therefore, I have found, not just in software, but in everything I’ve done it really pays to go after the best people in the world.

    Mike Janes, a former Apple executive, remembered a more concise Steve-ism