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

well-placed Silicon Valley executive reflected on why it would be difficult even for a talented Apple executive to turn HP around. “When Steve came back to Apple morale was terrible, but there remained a culture that understood what it meant to make great products,” this executive said. “HP hasn’t had that in years. There wouldn’t be anyone there to lead.”
    The genesis of most Apple products is simply Apple’s desire to make them. Not focus groups. Not reader surveys. Not a competitive analysis. An unwillingness to stick a finger in the wind of customer requirements was one of Steve Jobs’s favorite tropes over the years. “When we firststarted Apple we really built the first computer because we wanted one,” he told Michael Moritz in the early 1980s for his book
The Little Kingdom
. It was a line that Jobs repeated over and over for decades. Twenty-five years later he stated, “We really do have the strong belief that we are building pMace buildroducts for ourselves.”
    The iPhone is a classic case in point. Prior to the device’s introduction, Apple executives typically hated their smartphones. “That’s why we decided to do our own,” Jobs said in an explanation that works at two levels: It’s undoubtedly true, but it also sends a compelling message to customers.
We like the dog food so much we eat it ourselves. You won’t be disappointed.
    It’s astounding how little has changed philosophically at Apple from its earliest days to the present. Speaking of Jobs, Moritz writes: “He was unwilling to let product planning become burdened with analysis, focus groups, decision trees, the shifts of the bell curve, or any of the painful drudgery he associated with large companies. He found Apple’s prototype customer in the mirror and the company came to develop computers that Jobs, at one time or another, decided he would like to own.”
    D esign is the most tangible way to see Apple’s focus on detail. Apple products are born in another highly secured lab accessible to only a tiny number of Apple employees. It is called the Industrial Design studio, or ID for short. Its master is the designer Jonathan Ive, the closest any Apple executive other than Steve Jobs has ever come to celebrity status. Jobs loved spending time in the design studio,where he would sample the cookie dough Ive and his team were mixing.
    The key to Apple’s design philosophy is that design is where Apple products start. Competitors marvel at the point of prominence Apple’s industrial designers have. “Most companies make all their plans, all their marketing, all their positioning, and then they kind of hand it down to a designer,” said Yves Behar, CEO of the design consultancy Fuseproject. The process is reversed at Apple, where everyone else in the organization needs to conform to the designer’s vision. “If the designers say the material has to have integrity, the whole organization says okay,” said Behar. In other words, a designer typically would be told what to do and say by the folks in manufacturing. At Apple it works the other way around.
    John Sculley, Apple’s CEO in the 1980s, has continued to pay close attention to Apple, despite having had no relationship with the company in years. “Everything at Apple can be best understood through the lens of designing,” he told Leander Kahney, editor of the Apple-focused blog
Cult of Mac
, in 2010. He related a recent story about a friend who held meetings at Apple and Microsoft on the same day. “He went into the meeting at Apple [and] as soon as the designers walked in the room, everyone stopped talking because the designers are the most respected people in the organization. It is only at Apple where design reports directly to the CEO. Later in the day he was at Microsoft. When he went into the Microsoft meeting, everybody was talking and then the meeting starts and no designers ever walk into the room. All the technical people are sitting there trying to add