| If only they'd all "think different" the way Apple Computer recommends. Apple is a brand that'd rather have the human being take technology over. One bite, and you know. |
| This book, The Apple Way, begins by taking note of how user-friendly an Apple gizmo always is. Written by Jeffrey Cruikshank, former editor of HBS Bulletin, it proceeds to do what Harvard Business School would: derive management lessons from it. To the Apple-obsessed, or anyone familiar with the brand literature ranging from John Sculley's Odyssey to Young & Simon's iCon, this is an annoyance. After all, the Apple story is a saga of epochal relevance in this infoyug. It is nothing if not unique. Why wring it for lessons? |
| If the author just about saves his yen for generalisation from slipping into trivialisation, it's because he doesn't ignore Guy Kawasaki's oft-quoted quip, "Apple management""it's an oxymoron". Nor does he dismiss Apple's prime mover Steve Jobs""the man who envisioned high technology "for the rest of us"""as a nattering nutcase trying to run a company as a "medium of expression" for oddballs who dare to play in the intersexion of art and science. Cruikshank sneaks in some of the firm's idiosyncracies too: such as its refusal to partition its computers' memory space, a decision that handcuffed its Operating System (OS) and software applications (apps) together in "andgate" logic (anything off, and the whole thing'll crash). So this book is not entirely out of sync with the Apple buff's version of the Apple way. |
| "Maybe you had to be a pot-smoking, long-haired, college dropout in the summer of, say, 1969... to really understand Apple," writes the author, just before he heaves and lets himself go""on Apple Macintosh's "1984" commercial, the Ridley Scott one that smashed its way into mindspace. |
| No, this book is not an ode to Jobs-as-hero-archetype, the exiled whiz returning to save his company from the doom of computer commoditisation. Nor to the supremacy of market forces, Microsoft's Mac-copy Windows OS grabbing the standard by rallying ever more software programmers to itself, on the lure of spreading costs over ever more users""even as Windows-loaded hardware prices crash under the intensity of competition, pricing the real thing, Apple, into market isolation. |
| "Thanks Bill, the world's a better place," said Jobs in 1997, prematurely, when Microsoft took a 5-per cent equity nibble for $150 million. Since then, Apple's iMac and iPod have revived business. So, will Apple survive after all? Er... yes, no, maybe. "There will always be something that plays the role of an Apple," concludes Cruikshank. |
| But the OS standard, the software that operates as the modern interface between man and machine, is lost""for most practical purposes. In Jobs' view, had Apple gone with the trajectory of the brand's original vision instead of holding profit aloft, this wouldn't have happened. |
| That's debatable. Besides, how many people have time for the intellectual antecedents of the system that's currently dominant? It's a story at risk of receding into the rarefied realm of academia. But fear not: the Apple buff knows just how man-made, and thus fallible, that system is. |
| The Apple Way 12 Management Lessons from The World's Most Innovative Company |
| Jeffrey L Cruikshank Tata McGraw-Hill Pages: xviii+206 |
Explore Business Standard