Inside Apple: How America's Most Admired--and Secretive--Company Really Works by Adam Lashinsky Read Free Book Online

“temporary location-sharing” service.)
    For the most part, Apple counts on its employees to censor themselves. But in some cases, it pays attention to what employees say when they are out of the office—even when they’ve only walked across the street for a beer. BJ’s Restaurant and Brewhouse is tucked so close to Apple’s Cupertino campus that insiders jokingly refer to it as IL-7, for “Infinite Loop 7,” a building that doesn’t exist. Company lore holds that plainclothes Apple security agents lurk near the bar at BJ’s and that employees have been fired for loose talk there. It doesn’t quite matter if the yarn is true or apocryphal. The fact that employees repeat it serves the purpose.
    S teve Jobs once said that not talking about the inner workings of the company is something he borrowed from Walt Disney. The creator of the original Magic Kingdom felt the magic the public attributed to Disney would be diminished by excessive focus on what went on behind the scenes. What’s more, Disney enforced strict internalsecrecy. When it was planning Walt Disney World in Florida in the 1960s, for example, Disney formed a committee to work on a “Project X.” Internal memos about the plans for the new theme park were numbered so they could be tracked, according to Neal Gabler’s exhaustive biography,
Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination
.
    It’s one thing to pressure employees to keep information from falling into the wrong hands. Apple’s twist is that those wrong hands happen to include one’s own colleagues. It is, in the words of one former employee, “the ultimate need-to-know culture.” Teams are purposely kept apart, sometimes because they are unknowingly competing against one another, but more often because the Apple way is to mind one’s own business. This has a side benefit that is striking in its simplicity: Employees kept from butting into one another’s affairs will have more time to focus on their own work. Below a certain level, it is difficult to play politics at Apple, because the average employee doesn’t have enough information to get into the game. Like a horse fitted with blinders, the Apple employee charges forward to the exclusion of all else.
    Apple created an elaborate and unnerving system to enforce internal secrecy. It revolves around the concept of disclosure. To discuss a topic at a meeting, one must be sure everyone in the room is “disclosed” on the topic, meaning they have been made privy to certain secrets. “You can’t talk about any secret until you’re sure everyone is disclosed on it,” said an ex-employee. As a result, Apple employees and their projects are pieces of a puzzle. The snapshot of the completed puzzle is known only at the highest reaches of the organization. It calls to mind the cells a resistance organization plants behind enemylines, whose members aren’t given information that could incriminate a comrade. Jon Rubinstein, formerly Apple’s senior hardware executive, once deployed the comparison in a less flattering but equally effective manner. “We have cells, like a terrorist organization,” he told
Businessweek
simssweek
    As with any secret society, trustworthiness is not assumed. New additions to a group are kept out of the loop for a period of time, at least until they have earned their manager’s trust. Employees tell stories of working on “core technology” rather than actual products or of not being allowed to sit near the rest of the group for a months-long probation period. Organization charts, typical fare at most big companies, don’t exist at Apple. That is information employees don’t need and outsiders shouldn’t have. (When
Fortune
magazine printed an Apple org chart of its own design in May 2011, visitors to Apple told tales of employees becoming nervous merely being seen with a printed copy of it on their desks.) Employees do have one important source of information, however: the internal Apple Directory.