Leander Kahney has done an excellent article looking at Apple’s great and growing success, and how much of it may be based on going completely against the tide in terms of management practices and corporate philosophy.  While others have gone with a ‘touchy feely’ approach to management and staff relations, the piece gives us several examples of Steve Jobs representing the other extreme – parking in handicapped spaces at Apple HQ, reducing workers to tears, and fostering an intense and scary-sounding atmosphere.

Just a couple of the major contrasts between Apple and the rest of Silicon Valley, and even just generally accepted business wisdom over the last decade or so, that are highlighted are:

• Apple’s closed platform approach as others scramble towards more open-ness and interperability  – making them now the only PC maker left pitching a proprietary OS on their own hardware
• MS and Google and others continually striving to communicate better – encouraging employees to maintain their own blogs and pull no punches for example – while Apple embraces a secrecy ‘that approaches paranoia’ –  "Talking to outsiders is forbidden; employees are warned against telling their families what they are working on …". 
• And of course Jobs’ own leadership style – which Kahney portays as pretty fearsome:

At most companies, the red-faced, tyrannical boss is an outdated archetype, a caricature from the life of Dagwood. Not at Apple. Whereas the rest of the tech industry may motivate employees with carrots, Jobs is known as an inveterate stick man.

One of the most interesting ideas put forward in the article is that Apple would probably never have achieved many of its great product success stories if not for their strikingly different approach:

It’s hard to see how any of this would have happened had Jobs hewed to the standard touchy-feely philosophies of Silicon Valley. Apple creates must-have products the old-fashioned way: by locking the doors and sweating and bleeding until something emerges perfectly formed. It’s hard to see the Mac OS and the iPhone coming out of the same design-by-committee process that produced Microsoft Vista or Dell’s Pocket DJ music player.

So … nice guys finish last when it comes to creating great consumer products in the tech arena, seems to be the moral of the story so far.

There is also some very good stuff about how well placed Apple, and Jobs in particular, are for the ‘digitization of life’.

Well worth a read.  Check out the article at:

How Apple Got Everything Right By Doing Everything Wrong

Tags: Apple, Steve Jobs, Wired