Chapter 60 Section 6 Corporate Culture

A reporter once asked Jobs: "Your specialty lies in recruiting the best talents?" Jobs replied, "It's not exactly recruiting. Once you've hired people, you have to create the best possible environment for them, where they really feel that they're surrounded by people who are as good as they are, and that their work has huge implications." impact and be part of a strong, clear vision." That is to say, in addition to recruiting the best talents, Jobs will also strive to create the best working environment for these talents—this environment, which includes various hardware and software factors, is often referred to as corporate culture.

Today's Apple headquarters is located in Infinite Loop, Cupertino, California, USA. It is a group of office buildings arranged in a unique way.This group of office buildings consists of 6 low-rise office buildings. The entire park was built in 1993 and was originally leased and sold only to R&D companies. The 6 buildings were therefore named "R&D No. 1" to "R&D No. 6" ".In fact, the name "infinite roundabout" comes from the concept of "infinite loop" in programming. When Jobs was in charge of the Macin-tosh team, Apple began to move into the Infinity Roundabout and nearby office buildings one by one.After Jobs returned, in addition to the offices occupied by Apple, some non-R&D companies moved into the park, and the six buildings were renamed "Infinity Roundabout 1" to "Infinity Roundabout 6".Apple employees also affectionately refer to an isolated restaurant chain outside the parking lot in the southwest corner of the campus as "Infinity Roundabout 7."

Driving on Infinity Roundabout No. 1 and its surroundings gives people a different kind of stability and restraint.The trees around the road are lush and lush, and the office buildings with little change in appearance are scattered on both sides of the road. The dynamic colors and shapes that are often seen in the Google headquarters park are rarely seen in the park.In addition to selling Apple products, the store at the main entrance of the park also sells T-shirts, hats, mugs, water bottles, clothes and other souvenirs bearing the Apple logo.Walking into the central courtyard of the six office buildings in the park, visitors will always feel that this is a beautiful and tranquil garden, not a place where passionate engineers who are creating the future work.

In fact, what Jobs wanted to create within Apple was a corporate culture that was both future-oriented and technical elite-oriented, and well-ordered and well-regulated. Dominant, without overemphasizing hierarchy and structure like IBM's corporate culture.It can be said that what Jobs' Apple represents is an innovative culture set off by an authoritarian atmosphere. By the way, as the company continues to grow, Apple is building a new office park about a mile from Infinity Circle. On June 7, 2011, Jobs personally presented the design of the new park at the Cupertino Municipal Meeting.The new campus is expected to be completed in 2015 and will become a super office area covering an area of ​​150 acres and accommodating 12,000 employees.The land was originally owned by Hewlett-Packard, and Jobs apparently used the contacts accumulated in his early years to persuade HP to transfer the land to Apple.Jobs said: "You will find that the new campus looks like a spaceship that is landing. The building will be ring-shaped, and all of it will be curved glass. We have moved here the experience of building Apple stores before."

On the one hand, Apple's corporate culture is full of elements of free innovation and non-conformity.Kai-fu Lee, who had worked at Apple for six years, recalled: "Apple's culture is an engineer culture. At that time, an engineer claimed to be able to make a better chip than Intel, and Sculley bought him a chip worth 15 million yuan. US$ Cray supercomputer. Later, the project was canceled after it was found that it was impossible to compete with Intel, and tens of millions of dollars were wasted—for Apple, this was a mistake, but It’s also a reflection of Apple’s engineer culture.”

Apple's engineers are unconstrained in their work. In 1994, when Apple engineers were developing the Power Macintosh 7100 computer, they named the internal code of the project Carl Sagan (Carl Sagan), which is the name of the famous American astronomer and science fiction writer.Although the internal code of the project is not made public, Mr. Carl Sagan himself did not know from which source it happened.Mr. Sagan, who cared extremely about his reputation, was afraid that this internal code would really become the product name, so he sued Apple in a rage, and sent a lawyer's letter asking Apple to change the name.Apple agreed to change the name, but engineers retaliated by changing the project's name to "BHA," which is actually an acronym for "Big Head Astronomer."Sagan was once again enraged and took Apple to federal court.Still, the judge did not uphold Mr Sagan's lawsuit.To make fun of Sagan, Apple engineers changed the project's internal code again. This time, the Power Macintosh 7100 was called "LAW" by the engineers, which was actually an acronym for "lawyers are cowards."

Under the influence of Jobs, Apple employees sincerely believe that they are changing the world with their work.At Apple, work is elevated almost to the level of devotion, like religion.For example, on the day of a new product launch, employees stay up all night preparing for the next day's keynote presentation, as if on steroids.After Jobs or other executives start their speeches on the stage, Apple employees will frantically gather in offices, cafeterias or cafes to watch the live broadcast. These employees are almost as excited as the "fruit fans" who participated in the conference."Attending or watching an event is the best part of working at Apple," said one Apple employee.

On the other hand, Apple is almost one of the most demanding companies for employees in modern IT companies.Apple is not a workplace where you can casually laugh.A former Apple designer said: "Of course, Apple is a very strict and unforgiving work environment." You'd be honored to work for the company with the coolest fucking product in the world. So shut your mouth and get to work." Unlike the "Pirate Team" days of the Macintosh, at Apple headquarters today you don't see too many workers in shorts and flip flops, or individually decorated cubicles.After Jobs returned to Apple that year, he made strict regulations on employees, including no smoking in the park and prohibiting dogs from entering the park.This situation is completely the opposite of Google's office environment.You know, in Google, not only can you bring your dog to work, but there are even activities such as "Wear Pajamas to Work Day" and "Take Children to Work Day". The company is full of delicious and fun things.

Jobs also consciously or unconsciously imposed his own way of life on tens of thousands of employees in the park.Because of studying Buddhism, Jobs himself is a "fish vegetarian" who only eats fish and vegetarian food.Once, Jobs was asked at a company meeting what he was most dissatisfied with within the company.Jobs replied: "Employee cafeteria." Soon, Jobs replaced all the chefs and food buyers in the restaurant, and made a special trip to hire a new chef from one of his favorite restaurants.It didn't take long for everyone to discover that Jobs's own favorite tofu had become the protagonist of the staff restaurant menu.

Confidentiality is the most important part of Apple's corporate culture. Every employee who joins Apple is almost strictly required to abide by various confidentiality systems. For example, employees are not allowed to talk about any work-related content on blogs or any other public channels. It is absolutely forbidden to discuss company-related matters with your spouse. When working in a company, many confidential or legal-related matters cannot be discussed in e-mail.Regarding the negative reports about Apple from the outside world, Apple's public relations department will remain silent in most cases, and ordinary employees are even forbidden to express any opinions to the outside world.Employees of confidential projects or the industrial design team in charge of Ivey have to go through the strictly guarded security gates every day when they go to work, and they must swipe their cards and enter their passwords to pass through each gate.Cameras are installed in the confidential areas of the office, and the most confidential things are even wrapped in black cloth. Once the black cloth is removed, a red light will light up to remind employees to be extra careful.

In fact, most of the appearance leaks before the release of each generation of iPhone and iPad were leaked through Apple's partners, especially foundries. In 2010, when an Apple engineer was drinking in a bar, he accidentally lost the iPhone4 prototype he was testing at the time. The meddler sold the phone to the technology website Gizmodo, resulting in the most famous employee leak case in Apple’s history. This may be Apple's own biggest breach of secrecy in recent years. Strict management is also reflected in all aspects of employees' daily work.An employee of Apple China told us such a story: Once he went to Shanghai on a business trip and lived in a five-star hotel stipulated by the company.At Apple, employees must stay in hotels recommended by the company when they travel on business. For hotels that are not on the company’s list, even if the price is cheap, they cannot stay.The employee is at the hotel preparing materials for an upcoming meeting.Simultaneous interpretation is required for the conference, and hard copies of all slides must be prepared in advance for each simultaneous interpreter.The employee did the math, all the printouts had a total of more than 1,000 pages. If they were printed in the hotel’s business center, the price per page would be as high as 10 to 12 yuan, and the total cost would exceed 10,000 yuan. It would be better to buy a portable one nearby Printer, cheap to print yourself in the hotel room.But even if it is to save money for the company, such a thing must be reported to the superior for approval.The employee emailed the manager and did not go buy the printer until he received a positive reply from the manager and did all the preparations. Although Apple's corporate culture is known for its strictness, Apple people still like the working environment at Apple.Apple's turnover rate has always been low. "People join Apple and stay because they believe in the company's mission, even though personally, they may not be happy all the time," says an Apple headhunter. A former vice president of Apple said: "In Jobs' team, employees are still very happy to work. They don't feel that their creativity has been suppressed because Jobs is a genius. Jobs is very good at predicting the future. His Ideas are usually about three years ahead of everyone. Although Jobs is not always right, employees are very happy to have someone who can foresee future industry trends, and they are proud to have a leader who has such a deep understanding of the industry."