When Steve Jobs resigned as CEO in August 2011, Apple was weeks away from launching its new iPhone which would include the artificial intelligence-powered personal assistant software called Siri. In his 2012 book, Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired – and Secretive – Company Really Works ( John Murray ), Adam Lashinsky gives an account of a board meeting Jobs attended to announce his resignation and the tension in the air when Jobs asked Scott Forstall, Apple’s top executive for mobile software, to hand him the phone. “The scene illustrates many of the principles that make Apple great —but also different from most companies that are held up as models of good management,” says Lashinsky. Apple had concentrated its best manpower on a single product, developed in extreme secrecy, and “the phone’s mechanics and design reflected an obsessive focus on detail.” Also on display, observes Lashinsky, was a different breed of CEO who exhibited personality traits — narcissism, whimsy, disregard for the feelings of others.
A host of books have dissected Facebook’s myriad problems, including Steven Levy’s Facebook: The Inside Story , Ben Mezrich’s The Accidental Billionaires (adapted by David Fincher/Aaron Sorkin for The Social Network ) and Sarah Frier’s No Filter . Two journalists of The New York Times , Cecilia Kang and Sheera Frenkel, have written a dire tome on the Mark Zuckerberg creation this year. An Ugly Truth ( Little Brown/Hachette ) draws on interviews of hundreds of Facebook workers, former and present executives, e-mails, memos and white papers to profile a company “whose stated mission is to create a connected world of open expression, but whose corporate culture demands secrecy and unqualified loyalty.” Facebook, which recently changed the company name to Meta, has been fighting on several fronts, not least legal suits for harming its users and competitors with “toxic and harmful” content. Kang and Frenkel point out that Zuckerberg was so afraid of losing out to rivals that he sought to “extinguish or impede, rather than outperform or out-innovate, any competitive threat.” Zuckerberg said he had no interest in being interviewed by the two journalists which is something Steven Levy did not have to face when he wanted to write a book on Google.
Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin gave Levy unprecedented access to the company to let him see how it works. In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works and Shapes Our Lives ( Simon & Schuster ) explores how two students at Stanford found a way to do what no one else had done: “make billions of dollars from Internet advertising.” With this ‘cash cow’, says Levy, Google was able to expand dramatically on other “transformative projects” like more efficient data centres, free Internet videos (YouTube), cloud computing, digitising books and more.
In 2011, Brad Stone visited Seattle to meet Jeff Bezos to solicit his cooperation for The Everything Store ( Little Brown and Company,2013 ) in which he sought to chronicle the rise of Amazon, “an innovative, disruptive, and often polarizing technology powerhouse.” Stone writes that Bezos is extremely difficult to work for. “Bezos is a micromanager with a limitless spring of new ideas, and he reacts harshly to efforts that don’t meet his rigorous standards.” He and his employees can also be “ruthlessly competitive with rivals and even partners.” This year, he has written a sequel, Amazon Unbound , which takes in the launch of Echo, which runs the virtual assistant Alexa, and other ambitious projects.
