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

because of an urgent “Steve request.” “They went like this: ‘On vacation my product was going to be in a keynote, and I had to jump on a plane and rehearse all weekend.’ ”
    The competitive nature of the Apple culture comes into play. “Apple is a prizefight every day you go to work,” said Steve Doil, a onetime executive in Apple’s supply-chain organization. “If you’re distracted even a little bit then you slow down the team.” A former executive described the Apple culture in similar terms. “It’s a culture of excellence,” this executive noted. “There’s a sense that you have to play your very best game. You don’t want to be the weak link. There is an intense desire to not let the company down. Everybody has worked so hard and is so dedicated.”
    Apple’s culture is the polar opposite of Google’s, where flyers announcing extracurricular activities—from ski outings to a high-profile author series—hang everywhere. At Apple, the iTunes team sponsors the occasional band, and there is a company gym (which isn’t free), but by and large Apple people come to work to work. “At meetings, there is no discussion about the lake house where you just spent the weekend,” recalled a senior engineer. “You get right down to business.” The contrast with the non-Apple world is stark. “When you interact with people at other companies, there’s just a relative lack of intensity,” said this engineer. “At Apple, people are so committed that they go home at night and don’t leave Apple behind them. What they do at Apple is their true religion.”
    The attitude toward work at Apple hasn’t changed over the decades. Here’s how Joe Nocera, writing in
Esquire
magazine in 1986, described Jobs’s perspective on the Apple work environment:

He used to talk, for instance, about making Apple an “insanely great” place to work, but he wasn’t talking about irresistible perks or liberal benefits.Instead, he was talking about creating an environment where you would work harder and longer than you’d ever worked in your life, under the most grinding of deadline pressure, with more responsibility than you ever thought you could handle, never taking vacations, rarely getting even a weekend off… and you wouldn’t care! You’d love it! You’d get to the point where you couldn’t live without the work and the responsibility and the grinding der. grindiadline pressure. All of the people in this room had known such feelings about work—feelings that were exhilarating and personal and even intimate—and they’d known them while working for Steve Jobs. They all shared a private history of their work together at Apple. It was their bond, and no one who was not there could ever fully understand it.

    Almost nobody describes working at Apple as being fun. In fact, when asked if Apple is a “fun” place, the responses are remarkably consistent. “People are incredibly passionate about the great stuff they are working on,” said one former employee. “There is not a culture of recognizing and celebrating success. It’s very much about work.” Said another: “If you’re a die-hard Apple geek, it’s magical. It’s also a really tough place to work. You have products that go from inception to launch, which means really late hours.” A third similarly dodged the question: “Because people are so passionate about Apple, they are aligned with the mission of the company.”
    If they don’t join for a good time, they also don’t join Apple for the money. Sure Apple has spawned its share of stock-options millionaires—particularly those who had thegood timing to join in the first five or so years after Jobs returned. “You can get paid a lot of money at most places here in the Valley,” said Frederick Van Johnson, the former Apple marketing employee. “Money is not the metric.”
    By reputation, Apple pays salaries that are competitive with the marketplace—but no better. A senior director