A new book about Apple and Steve Jobs will be available tomorrow on Amazon and at booksellers nationwide (if any are left). Inside Apple: How America's Most Admired—and Secretive—Company Really Works, by Fortune magazine senior editor Adam Lashinsky, gives the inside story on how Apple operates. The book reveals the secret systems, tactics, and leadership strategies that allowed Steve Jobs and Apple to come out with such amazingly successful products — even to the point of inspiring a cult following. Also, as with the Walter Isaacson biography, there are some tantalizing tidbits, such as Steve Jobs's intention to reinvent photography and the prospect of Apple's adopting a revolutionary new camera technology (which I'll touch on in a moment).
Apple's secrecy is legendary, and author Lashinsky talks to former employees to learn how — and why — Apple is so obsessive regarding secrecy. In this fascinating excerpt on the CNNMoney website, Lashinsky details the measures that Apple takes to inspire, and enforce, secrecy. Apple engineers were trained to never talk about what they were working on. And if Apple employees are ever caught intentionally or unintentionally revealing Apple secrets, the result is instant termination. Lashinsky says that the secrecy begins even as employees are hired — often not knowing exactly what they're going to be working on. And then when they start work and learn exactly what the project is, they also learn that they can't tell anyone about it, not even other Apple employees.
And when a project is super secret, Apple even has lockdown rooms, with no windows. Employees only know that a secret project is afoot when they see the building being remodeled with new doors, and windows being frosted over so that they're opaque. Lashinsky says that all companies have secrets, but that Apple is different because there everything is a secret.
What's most fascinating, though, is the reason for this secrecy — which Lashinsky makes quite clear. It creates buzz. Apple is, in essence, deliberately manipulating the media, knowing that the rumors and speculation are worth millions of dollars that they would otherwise need to spend on advertising. Then when the product is actually launched, it gets a huge amount of attention — so much so that Apple's website, and most of the websites that were live-blogging the event, went down when the iPhone 4S was announced. Plus, if people know exactly what's coming, they might not buy the current version that's still being sold. And why let competitors know sooner than necessary what's in the pipeline, giving them more of an opportunity to catch up? If you've got something innovative, keep it under wraps until the product is released.
Another reason for secrecy, Lashinsky says, is simply focus. If employees don't know much about other projects going on, there's less politicking and more focus on what they should be doing. In an email to me, Lashinsky said that focus is the key to understanding Steve Jobs's leadership ability: "Steve Jobs understood the power of focusing one’s efforts. He demanded that his people focused on their precise tasks and almost nothing else. Not only do most Apple employees focus on only a few things at once, Apple, as a company focuses on only a few products at a time. It’s a bit of common sense that is rarely applied at other companies."
Other tidbits in the book include Lashinsky's suggestion that Scott Forestall, who heads the iOS division, will be CEO when Tim Cook steps down. Most tantalizing, though, may be the details on Steve Jobs's desire to reinvent photography. According to iMore, the book says that Jobs met with the CEO of Lytro, which has a revolutionary new camera technology. When you take a photo, the camera captures the entire light field. The advantage of this is that you can change the focus of an image after you take the picture. You don't have to focus the lens before taking the photo — you simply capture the light field, and then do all the focusing in the editing process. This lets you take photos quickly without having to take time to make adjustments. It also apparently allows for taking photos in very low light. Will we see this technology in an iOS device? Or will Apple sell a camera? The blogs are buzzing with speculation, but there's little basis as of now.
Another tidbit, which you can read about on AppleInsider, is Apple's "packaging room." Apple actually has a secure room in which employees simply open the packaging on Apple products. Apple reportedly spends months getting the experience just right. This seems extreme, yet it's this obsessive attention to detail that has helped Apple be a success.
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