Apple University: where employees are not born, but made

Company’s secretive university teaches what it is to be an Apple staff member, how to think like Steve Jobs and compares the company to Picasso.

Many companies have internal training programmes, but Apple’s goes far further than most teaching employees how to think like Steve Jobs.


The highly secretive Apple University, profiled in detail by the New York Times, was established by Jobs in 2008 to teach what it meant to be an Apple employee, educating them about the company’s culture and history.


Some are tailored to different topics like how to integrate your recently purchased company into Apple, which could be useful for Jimmy Iovine, Dr Dre and their recently acquired Beats team.


‘What makes Apple, Apple’


One of the courses, entitled “What makes Apple, Apple”, uses the difference between the remote from Google’s failed TV initiative with its 78 buttons and the Apple TV remote, which has just seven buttons to teach the “less is more” approach Apple takes with most things.


Another likens Apple to Picasso using a series of 11 lithographs of a bull created by the artist showing a refinement from fully detailed sketch of a bull to a characteristic line-art stick figure of a bull.


“You go through more iterations until you can simply deliver your message in a very concise way, and that is true to the Apple brand and everything we do,” a person who attended the course anonymously recalled to the New York Times.


Jobs put the former Yale School of Management’s dean Joel Podolny in charge of the programme, and managed to attract faculty members from a raft of US universities, including Harvard, Stanford and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.


The courses are run all year round at a dedicated facility at Apple’s headquarters in California, but they are not compulsory despite being full most of the time.



The guardian.com