Steve Jobs established Apple University as a way to inculcate employees into Apple’s business culture and educate them about its history, particularly as the company grew and the tech business changed. Courses are not required, only recommended, but getting new employees to enroll is rarely a problem.
Although many companies have such internal programmes, sometimes referred to as indoctrination, Apples version is a topic of speculation and fascination in the tech world.
No talking about AppleIt is highly secretive and rarely written about, referred to briefly in the biography of Jobs by Walter Isaacson. Apple employees are discouraged from talking about the company in general, and the classes are no exception. No pictures of the classrooms have surfaced publicly. And a spokeswoman for Apple declined to make instructors available for interviews for this article.
But three employees who have taken classes agreed to speak to The New York Times on the condition that they not be identified. They described a programme that is an especially vivid reflection of Apple and the image it presents to the world. Like an Apple product, it is meticulously planned, with polished presentations and a gleaming veneer that masks a great deal of effort.
Even the toilet paper in the bathrooms is really nice, one of the employees said.
Unlike many corporations, Apple runs its training in-house, year round. The full-time faculty including instructors, writers and editors create and teach the courses. Some faculty members come from universities like Yale, Harvard, University of California at Berkeley, Stanford and MIT, and some continue to hold positions at their schools while working for Apple.
What are the courses like?Randy Nelson, who came from the animation studio Pixar, co-founded by Jobs, is one of the teachers of Communicating at Apple. This course, which is open to various levels of employees, focuses on clear communication, not just for making products intuitive, but also for sharing ideas with peers and marketing products.
In What Makes Apple, Apple, another course that Nelson occasionally teaches, he showed a slide of the remote control for the Google TV, said an employee who took the class last year. The remote has 78 buttons. Then, the employee said, Nelson displayed a photo of the Apple TV remote, a thin piece of metal with just three buttons.
How did Apples designers decide on three buttons? They started out with an idea, Nelson explained, and debated until they had just what was needed a button to play and pause a video, a button to select something to watch, and another to go to the main menu.
The Google TV remote serves as a counterexample; it had so many buttons because the individual engineers and designers who worked on the project all got what they wanted. But, Apples designers concluded, only three were really needed. The Best Things, another course, takes its name from a quote by Jobs. The courses purpose is to remind employees to surround themselves with the best things, like talented peers and high-quality materials, so that they can do their best work.
