How does Apple really work? Well, there's an app (oops) book to explain it

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Steve Jobs unveils new products. (AP)

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Inside Apple

How America's Most Admired -- and Secretive -- Company Really Works

By Adam Lashinsky

Hachette Book Group, 208 pages, $30

"GIVE me the phone," Apple founder Steve Jobs barks at another Apple executive presenting the latest iPhone software at a board meeting.

"Are you a man or a woman?" Jobs demands of Siri, the HAL-like computer assistant.

"I have not been assigned a gender, sir," Siri shoots back.

American journalist Adam Lashinsky's opening anecdote speaks volumes about the corporate culture he is trying to chronicle.

Jobs was resigning as CEO that day, as his declining health forced him to end his corporate responsibilities.

Yet he could not resist demonstrating for one last time his obsession with the details of building products and experiences that consumers would love.

While doing so, he treated a trusted executive as a joe-boy and threw a curve ball that could have derailed the whole presentation.

This is the first book for Lashinsky, the senior editor-at-large for Fortune magazine, who has written cover stories on Apple, Google and Hewlett-Packard.

Lashinsky focuses on how Jobs built and operated the company to conceive, design and build those lovable, almost cultish products, while trying to determine how much of Apple's magic can be transplanted to other companies.

His chapter titles contain such useful advice as "Own Your Message" and "Stay Start-Up Hungry."

Those aphorisms sound intuitive. But Lashinsky shows that at Apple, people always think and act different(ly).

Time and again, those differences all trace back to the centre of the Apple-verse -- Steve Jobs.

Apple had languished in mediocrity for more than a decade after John Sculley, the former Pepsi executive brought in by Jobs to run the company, sent the founder into exile.

When Jobs returned, he oversaw the creation of the iMac and Macbook, iPod, iTunes, iPhone and iPad, all now with huge market share in their industries.

The corporate culture Jobs created to get there -- obsession with design over costs, secrecy, playing favourites, encouraging infighting -- defies every rule of conventional management taught at business schools because he'd never been to one.

Lashinsky was not granted an interview with Jobs before his death or Tim Cook, the new CEO, in stark contrast to Walter Isaacson, who wrote the recent bestselling authorized biography, Steve Jobs.

Lashinsky makes two references to Isaacson's work, including a telling quote that Jobs admitted he was "rankled and deeply depressed" when he was on a medical leave in 2009.

Other quotations are largely from former Apple employees and industry observers. Many of them so feared Jobs, they did not want to be named, even when they were saying nice things.

The book is readable but at the occasional cost of clear, basic information that should be in any company profile, such as profits (no numbers) and total workforce (three different numbers.) Lashinsky asks the fundamental question of how Apple can maintain its corporate culture after Jobs' death.

His answers pull back the curtain a little bit on the personalities now jockeying for position in a post-Jobs Apple.

Not one of them has the flair, dynamism, creativity or chutzpah of their mentor.

Lashinsky concludes that Apple will inevitably lose momentum and become just another ordinary company without its founder to guide its spirit.

Somewhere, Steve Jobs is smiling. Perhaps for the first time.

Donald Benham teaches politics and the mass media at the University of Winnipeg.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition February 11, 2012 J8