When a new vice president is appointed to Apple, CEO Steve Jobs has a cautionary tale to tell them.
The story, of the difference between janitor and an executive, is always the same – as is its message; failure and excuses for failure will no longer be tolerated
The revelation is made in an article on the inner workings of Apple and its boss, written by Adam Lashinsky and published in the current edition of Fortune.
Lashinsky writes: ‘Jobs imagines his garbage not being regularly emptied in his office, and when he asks the janitor why, he gets an excuse: the locks have been changed and the janitor doesn’t have a key.
In his report, based on hundreds of interviews with former Apple employees and experts on the computing giant, Lashinsky paints Mr Jobs as something of a dictator – involved in every decision, right down to the design of shuttle buses ferrying employees to work and the food that is to be served in the cafeteria.
He meets with executives every Monday to discuss projects. The marketing and communications chiefs are summoned every Wednesday.
Mr Jobs is not someone you want to disappoint.
When the company released its iPhone 3G and MobileMe service in 2008, it suffered its most humiliating failure.
MobileMe was plagued by slow loading and infuriatingly regular server problems.
It led to critics asking whether the product was rushed onto the market, with Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg writing that he couldn’t recommend the service because it had too many flaws. Nothing goes on at Apple without Mr Jobs’s seal of approval, and it is this autocratic culture which could be thrown into chaos as Mr Jobs suffers increasingly poor health.
It is why Apple’s share price suffered a ‘flash crash’ earlier in the year when news of Mr Jobs’s deteriorating health due to cancer sent ripples through the market.
The Fortune article is a fascinating look behind the scenes of one of the most successful companies in history.
Unsurprisingly, considering the amount of money which could be won or lost through innovation, Mr Jobs is a highly secretive CEO.
The Top 100 is a secret meeting that Mr Jobs holds each year, at an undisclosed location, with 100 of his leading employees and executives.
So paranoid is Apple about big-eared competitors, meeting rooms are swept for electronic bugs and listening devices – and guests at the meeting are put through a TSA-style security check upon arrival.
Once a project is nearing completion, the company directs an avalanche of cash at marketing. The London Symphony orchestra was contracted to record the iMovie soundtracks; they sent a camera crew to Hawaii to film a wedding scene in another marketing move, as well as filming secondary shots of another ‘wedding’ in San Francisco – with Apple employees roped in to play guests.
Mr Jobs hired Joel Podolny, dean of Yale University, to run Apple University – an in-house group training Apple employees for life after Mr Jobs.