Inside apple is a book where the author lets us discover the whole new strategic world of Apple directed first by Steve Jobs. It introduces the original way Apple manages its company. We learned that the business strategy model Apple is using is completely different from what we learned in school. We’ve always learned that a company has to have free flow information contrary to Apple that faces a large secretly managerial structure.
By the time you finish reading the book, you will have a completely different idea of what you thought about apple, and you will probably be afraid of working for that firm. The author shares with us many interviews he has done to Apple employees and they help you discover how they feel working there. Overall, this book will please anyone interested in International Business, and personally, it pleased me.
I had no preference to any chapter, as they all conform the history of the company and how it woks, but I did pay more attention to Chapter 4 “Stay Start-up Hungry’ because it explains how Steve Jobs reentered his own company and did all the necessary changes to make it the best company in the market. After analyzing the chapter, I figured out Steve Jobs changed the company’s culture and make employees ark at what they were best and nothing else. Apple created an atmosphere where employees where supposed to think big and mediocrity was not allowed in that place.
In this chapter Lashing’s reminds us that in Apple, you can rapidly know who is responsible for what and that is the reason why there are no committees within the enterprise: because there are no division of responsibilities. My attention was caught by a very innovative key term on page 67: IT “Directly responsible Individual” that helped the employees know with clarity who the direct responsible is. For example, the only responsible about the company finances was the Chief Financial Officer.
If you ask other managers in the company about the company’s finances they would not be able to give you a clear answer, and that is how it is supposed to be; Jobs wanted every manager to focus on their specific area rather than worrying about other areas of the company. The company has organized itself along functional lines, not into separate business units. Steve Jobs liked to work in an environment where there is only one grade on distance to connect with another manager. There were no virtual conferences in that company.
As explained in page 78, Apple is a hard company to work in. They want specific educated people that work hard and complete the task in a short period of time, because the company is always running so fast and lean. It is interesting how Apple works on very small groups of team members. In the company, really small teams work on really important projects. There is no necessity to hire dozens of employees when two or three people can do the project. In many enterprises structure, there is always an employee A that is in charge to employee B who is in charge of employee C.
Steve Jobs only wanted employees A working for his company. They wanted the employees to feel important about what they were doing because that was the best they were at, and surprisingly the employees never felt they wanted to keep on climbing the ladder of managerial structure because they felt comfortable with their Jobs and they thought they have found their perfect Job instead. If someday I manage to run my own company, there are for sure many concepts I read from the book that I would apply. Of course Apple is well known from the beauty of its products.
Their idea from starting the creation of a product starts with the design and then everything goes around it. The functionality and operations come after the design, which is why every single Apple product is considered as a beautiful item. They like to keep their products simple. Another thing I really liked about this company is the way they keep every idea as a secret. In my opinion, this increases sales the first day the product is launched into the market because as the clients have got it as a surprise, they do not have enough time to think about the product so they would run right the first day to buy it.
One of the main ideologies the book explains about Steve Jobs is that he created something not with the thought of raring revenues, but to create history. I do not think I agree with that, because even though a business is created to cover society needs, the main goal of a company or business is always to create revenues to its stakeholders. That is one Stave’s idea I would not follow if I had to make a decision within my company. I liked the idea of Steve Jobs repeating things to his employees because it transmits the exact idea he wants them to know.
I believe it is a great way to have everything under your control. At Apple there’s never confusion “as to who is responsible for what” because the many owns a great information flow about the individual responsibilities. He does the same thing with his customers, taking an example from the book, in 2000, when he launched the new pod, the person responsible to talk to media used to repeat many times “1 ,OHO songs in your pocket”, slogan used to promote the first generation of pod’s large storage capacity and compact design.
The company was known for always repeating what it is important, and in every interview they had, they always repeated the main idea they wanted the customer to know, in order for him not to be infused with many information flowing among the society. Lashing’s explains many good and bad experiences Apple had faced during its life cycle. For example, in 2008 Apple launched Mobile, which was one of the worst failures for the company. Apple promised Mobile was going to be an innovative tool to offer web access to mail and calendars.
However, when the product was launched to public, customers realized the product was not working the way it should have; there were slow loading times and servers were always down. Of course customers started to ask themselves whether that product was ready to be launched r Apple precipitated the launching of that product without the right experimentation on it. After the controversy the society created, Steve Jobs called their executives to a meeting telling them Apple reputation was going down because to them and named new executives in the Mobile team.
I consider that in the past years, the new team has improved very well and has recently launched the new version of Mobile named cloud. A few months ago, one of my uncles made me read Caisson’s biography of Steve Jobs because as I am a big fan of Apple gadgets (l own a Macho Pro, pad, pod and Phone), he thought it could to be interesting to me to know the story of the great creator of the products I was having home, and that it would make me understand the main reason I bought the Apple products and what made me choose them over other products.
To tell you the truth I was not interested at all in reading it but at the end I did it and I was very impressed about what I read. By far I prefer Caisson’s book. The main difference between both books is that Caisson writes directly Steve Jobs thoughts by interviews and Lashing’s writes about how people working for Steve Jobs feel like and writing about their tales. They are two completely different kinds of readings.
My overall expectation before reading this book was that I was going to be able to enter the doors of one of the greatest company in the world and study how it really works from the inside. It definitely achieved its goal not only providing us ideas Steve Jobs applied to make the company run but it also provides us tales from employees, ex employees, managers and general workers that tell us about their very personal experience working inside for the company.
I do think Apple could be even more successful, hard as that is to imagine, without the paranoia and bad behavior shown by Jobs in the book. However, I think some people will conclude that Apple is dumb and Apple is successful, therefore, being dumb makes you successful, and for me that is not the right human resources strategy to implement in the code of ethics of a company. I have a very special favorite phrase from the book and I would like to share it.
From pages 91 to 92, you are able to read one Lashing’s comment about how the firms wants the employees to feel and I think it is a very deep and intelligent comparison: To succeed in a company where there is obsessive focus on detail and paranoid guarding of secrets, and where employees are asked to work in a state of permanent start-up, you must be willing to mesh your talents with those of the corporation. You have to forget your desire to be acknowledged by the outside world and instead derive satisfaction from being a cell in an organism that is changing the world. This particular phrase got all my attention and minutes of refluxing from my part. It is not a matter of working in a good company what makes you special; it is the matter that oh are doing something special for the world. Employees in Apple are used not to receive greetings from what they are doing, but they feel great doing it because even know some secrets are kept from them, they are still part of that great family, or they are a cell in the great body of Apple and they feel indispensable and useful for the company to create innovative products.
I feel comfortable about Lashing’s way to inspire us about Apple’s business strategy, but I would rather near those experiences not trot employees inside the tall, but from the same Steve Jobs. More personal interviews and more education about his win personal ideas would have created other kind of book more referred about its protagonist. As I felt, Apple was the protagonist, not Steve Jobs as the CEO. I would recommend the author to use strategic charts, public information, media reports, news and other tools to make the information he is talking about clearer.
In these types of book where you got to see internal structures, it is always useful to have interactive tools that manage to help you clear your ideas. The best concept I got from this book was innovation. The history has shown us many companies that tried to reach the same success Apple did, but failed trying. I think the main key a company needs in order to succeed is innovation, and that meaner not only innovating your products, but also innovating ideas and structures, Just as Steve Jobs disc with his code of ethics.
The book surely changed the way I thought about the company, because even when I had already read a Steve Job’s biography, this book emphasizes the company as the main topic. I had the idea of how the company was managed but I did not know how the employees felt working there, and how the work environment was so heavy. I simply can’t figure out from the book if Apple is a happy or unhappy workplace. It’s Lear that employee happiness was certainly never a top priority for Steve Jobs and other top executives.
On the other hand, their pride in their products and in working for Jobs’ vision makes them happy. As a student of LAIN, I learned more that I could imagine from this book. It is completely the opposite from what I have learned from my Business classes in college, it is a completely new way of managing an enterprise. I cannot forget what Steve Jobs explained about Apple’s core strengths: “Focusing is powerful. A start- up’s focus is very clear. Focus is not saying yes. It is saying no to really great ideas.
In order to create and manage your own company, you need much more than only the idea of a product. You have to have the vision of a new word, a new society, and that is something that is easily said but hardly done. You have to learn how to manage your own workers and make them understand that they are important for the company. And the most important, never lose focus of what your goal is, always innovate. We can agree or disagree with many of the methods used at Apple. What we cannot disagree with is the success from a business perspective they have attained. And yes, I read it on an pad.
