Inside Apple is actually a look at Apple by an outsider, in more ways than one. Although Adam Lashinsky confesses to having had no formal access to anyone at Apple, what he does not own up to but becomes brutally evident as one starts reading is that he is an outsider to both management theory and Silicon Valley. He uses ossified ideas of business to read what’s essentially the new creative culture industry. Nowhere does he even get close to discussing the value-creating core of Apple. He is much too fascinated with the surface of the company, the organisational chart, personality and charisma of the leader, form factors, branding and public relations. It’s a book that gets nowhere near the ideology of Apple, and the meaning it holds for its millions of devotees. So, in plainspeak, it “describes” Apple but doesn’t “deconstruct” it. There is, I am afraid, all this talk of Religion, but no Revelation.
Apple is easily the most followed company in the universe, and Steve Jobs the most photographed, quoted and published CEO ever. That makes it challenging for anyone to offer any new material or insight, and the spate of books published after his death are more dead than alive themselves — dead because they are largely recitations of old stories. I would firmly place this book right at the top of the pyre.
Inside Apple is actually a patchwork of opinions of ex-Apple employees, the view of the inside by people who are now all, ironically, outside Apple. It’s a book that uses anecdotes for insights and converts the non-availability of access into the virtues of secrecy and mystification. This is a book that spends a lot of time regurgitating the folklore, and at best could work for those who know nothing about Apple.
We are delivered all the new management clichés as original insights into what makes Apple “Apple”. To name a few — embrace secrecy, focus obsessively, stay start up, hungry, hire disciples, own your message, dominate foes, plan for after your successor, inspire imitators. I think this does great disservice to one of the great companies, ideas and people of our times.
Apple is a question of philosophy, not of management style, of who is God — Bauhaus or the consumer, Apple is a question of truth, not taste. A question of purity not of employment. Of being so totally true to oneself that the distinctions between person, product, company and brand disappear. Of there being no need to second guess. Apple is a question of the unity of art and technology, not of seeing them as contradictions, the eastern mind sees opposites as complementary not contradictory.
Apple is a living testimony to the simple fact that almost all the great companies and brands built in the world have been built by people not by committees at companies, and they have been created out of great personal vision and even greater belief, and not through technology, design, management and branding.
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The question to ask is, where does Apple come from? And it’s important to understand that it did not suddenly appear from nowhere, Apple is deeply influenced by the rich intellectual traditions of Braun and Bauhaus and the then revolutionary idea that form follows function. The even more revolutionary idea for business that “creativity comes from inside” and is best used to service the self; only then does one produce something great and not by listening and “appeasing the consumer outside”.
To quote Morozov in his review of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs, “Apple’s most incredible trick is to allow its customers to feel as if they are personally making history — that they are a sort of spiritual-historical elite, even if there are many millions of them. The purchaser of an Apple product has been made to feel like he is taking part in a world — historical mission, in a revolution — and Jobs was so fond of revolutionary rhetoric that Rolling Stone dubbed him ‘Mr. Revolution’.”
We live in a world where we celebrate the will of the creator more than any other power, we think of them as gods, we want to be touched by them, we all want to be part of something greater than ourselves and Apple understood this better than anyone else.
The reviewer is Founder, Religious, a cultural branding company
INSIDE APPLE
HOW AMERICA'S MOST ADMIRED — AND SECRETIVE — COMPANY REALLY WORKS
Author: Adam Lashinsky
Publisher: Hodder and Staughton
Pages: 240
Price: Rs 499