A nice article about culture and how jobs ensures that apple has a the same spirit and focus of a start up.
Jobs could have focused on near-term fixes. Instead, he focused on building a high-performance culture by doing three things well.
1. He refocused the strategy to be about one thing. That meant he killed off even good things. I led server channel management at Apple when Jobs returned to the company in 1997, and I was there when he made the decision to shut down big portions of revenue-generating businesses (including my division) because they didn't fit with his vision for the company. Some people thought he was crazy. But he was being extremely clear, and in doing so, he "MurderBoarded"—eliminated many options to get one cohesive strategy—his way to greatness.
2. He eliminated passive aggressiveness and encouraged debate when new ideas were forming. When you are thinking about difficult problems together with exceptionally bright people, there are going to be disagreements. But it is through the tension of that creative conflict that new ideas get born, new angles get explored, and risks get mitigated. Thinking together means you deal with conflict up front, rather than have to counter passive aggressiveness on the back end.
3. He set up a cross-disciplinary view of how the company would succeed. This holistic vision means there is cohesion throughout the company, from concept to product to sales. For example, the retail strategy could have been a separate or disparate part of the whole, but Apple has made its retail strategy part and parcel of its overall promise of ease of use.
None of these three things is easy to do. It would be easy to count any revenue as good revenue, to allow a few people to stay even though they were rotting the culture, or to allow the different parts of a business to act in their silos. Apple's leadership doesn't accept easy. Executives believe that when the company wins, everyone wins. That belief drives the necessary behavior and tradeoffs necessary to achieve success. That's why Jobs has earned the respect of his peers. He has recreated a culture in which the company acts like all the best parts of a startup.
Full article on
http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/jun2010/id20100610_525759.htm
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