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“Inside Apple” Chapter 4 - Stay Start up Hungry

When Steve Jobs rejoined Apple in 1997, it looked like big companies everywhere. “Like other companies” is precisely what Jobs did not want Apple to be. After Jobs returned, the corporate culture changed, employees would focus on whatever they did best and nothing else.

Jobs would tell the story of confronting sixteen divisions at Apple, each with a divisional advertising budget. He put an end to it quickly and he made sure that only the hottest product would command the most advertising dollars, which has always been a success model for apple by promoting fewer rather than more products.

DRI
The notion of responsibility is enshrined in Apple with an acronym DRI - Directly Responsible Individual. It is the person on any given assignment who will be called in the carpet if something isn’t done right. There’s no confusion of who’s going to do what, it’s very detailed oriented.

For example graphic designer just needs to think about the biggest graphics thought he can focus on being world class in his area. Being a well rounded employee is neither required nor frankly wanted. Be the best at your thing was what Apple wanted.
At Apple, small team works on really important projects. That is one of the advantages of being in a start-up. For example: just two engineers wrote the code for converting Apple’s safari browser for the iPad

Values at Apple
Putting together corporate attributes – clear direction, individual accountability, sense of urgency, constant feedback, and clarity of mission comprises of Apple’s values. Values may be a soft topic in the corporate world, a term that’s interchangeable with culture or core beliefs. In case of Apple – It is being able to assess how deeply ingrained its values are and informs the question of how the company will fare without Steve Jobs.

Hiring Talent
Steve Jobs long considered the issue of spotting and grooming talent to be one of the most important aspects of being an entrepreneur and CEO.

Once hired, people stay at Apple for years, assuming they have learned to accept the literal and unspoken terms of employment. At the time Steve Jobs resigned as CEO, every member of the executive team except for general counsel and CFO had been in their jobs since at least 2000

Apple is not for everyone. “Apple runs so fast and so lean it requires people to really work hard and take on a lot of tasks and do them in a short period of time,” said a recruiter who is close to Apple employees. They want to be a part of something cool, but then they get in there and they’re like “Oh this really isn’t the hip company that I thought it was”.

If more companies did these things, it might work, and it might not. It might not even work so well at Apple after Steve Jobs hasn’t been CEO for a few years. But if more companies thought about such things, they’d most certainly be more like Apple.