Sorry for the light posting over the last few days–been in crisis management mode. Today’s perspicacious cultural analysis comes via an Apple engineer via Boing Boing:
Hung Ma hints that MobileMe’s launch problems were totally avoidable, but Apple’s corporate culture ostracizes potential problem labelers as cynical, hyper-critical mavericks. “Not team players,” in other words.
Even with 100% hindsight, knowing exactly what caused the failure, if I had raised that issue before launch, there was no way I could have convinced anyone of the full seriousness of the problem. At best I would just be seen as merely doing my job, but more likely I would have been seen as a naysayer who isn’t “fully on board” and instead trying to slow everyone down with overblown hypothetical edge cases.
Hung Ma then goes on to claim that this is not a specific dig at Apple, but rather an indictment of “corporate culture” as a whole. I’m unconvinced: Apple is different from most companies in that it is headed by a galvanic, steel-willed prophet / despot, whose visions mercilessly drive the entire company. It is easy to imagine Apple, as a culture, being too soft willed to challenge him with the devastating consequences of what Jobs might consider to be mundane technical details when his mind is made up about something.
This post is being written on the seventh Mac I have owned in the last decade or so, and I’m also a fan of the several iPods I’ve enjoyed. Additionally, I am a MobileMe user and have been (for the most part) happy with the service. Apple makes very high-quality products.
That said, I have no problem believing this view of Apple and of Steve Jobs. It’s easy to see how the products the company makes would require employees to put in high-quality work and also to fall in line when a decision is made. It’s also easy to see how Jobs might embody an abundance of certainty.
There’s no real value judgment implied with all of this, by the way, at least not from my observations. Some of this culture has worked well for Apple, and perhaps some has worked against the company. My only add would be that a culture like this might increase the likelihood of some hazards, among them the groupthink / Abilene Paradox that throws up blinders to dynamics that may undermine a decision.
[Note: Am I going easier on Apple than I might on another organization? Am I an apologist for Apple? Yeah, probably.]
It seems to me that something like this is sort of inevitable when an organization becomes a cult of personality (i.e. Steve Jobs). While I’m writing this message on my work PC, if I were at home I’d be writing this message on my 3rd Mac in the last 15 years…so I’m a fan of their products. But success, I think, should be based on more than the vision of one person…and I’m sure Apple isn’t just Jobs, but that is the perception. They have had a run of good products with a few flops or stumbles (MobileMe, Newton, and the Apple version of AOL back in the mid-90s come to mind), but the consistent quality of the rest of their product line would lead me to believe that groupthink hasn’t taken over just yet… but time will tell.
Nice post. publicorgtheory.org deservss an oscar.