The more we know about Apple, it seems, the less we really know. According to the journalist and writer Adam Lashinsky, America’s most admired company is also America’s least understandable company. And that’s why he wrote Inside Apple – to reveal to the world how, as the subtitle of his book says, the Company Really Works.
Apple, Lashinsky revealed to me when he came into our New York City studio earlier this week, is organized like a terrorist cell. It’s a “closed caste system”, he explained, in which a few hand picked elites like Tim Cook and Scott Forstall collectively run the company without any input from ordinary employees. Apple encourages anything but an open or friendly culture, Lashinksy explained. It has what he calls, in Inside Apple, a “confrontational” workplace culture in which everyone is “at each other’s throats”. No prizes, of course, for guessing how Apple figured out the value of confrontation and why being at somebody else’s throat is considered a virtue rather than a vice in Cupertino.
This is the second and final part of my interview with Lashinsky. Yesterday, he explained to me why there’s no free lunch at Apple and how Steve’s company has become the anti-Google of Silicon Valley.