Most of us know nothing about Apple University, or the DRI or the top hundred in the company. So, we have Apple, not Apple, we have Adam, excuse me, Adam and his Apple. We have Adam, our mole at Apple, to tell us, our Tech-Crunch audience, what really happens at Apple, what goes on. What little organizations drive the company.

Adam, welcome back to TechCrunch TV.

Thank you very much.

So Adam, what is Appleuniversities .

Apple University is something that Steve Jobs started in 2008 by hiring the away, the dean of the Yale School of Management named Joel Podolny and it is an organization that teaches case studies of how Apple has made decisions in the past to its own senior and middle level management. I talk in the book about some of the hires that Joel Poldony has made.

He has hired a small core of other business school professors like himself. So for example, and very prominently, he hired Richard Tedlow from Harvard. He’s well known in Silicon Valley as the historian of Andy Grove and other leaders of the technology industry over time. Tedlow has been giving lectures to Apple executives about how other great companies handled being great and handled success and including how some did well and how some didn’t do so well.

An example of a company that did well, he teaches the famous Tylenol tampering case as an example, a positive example, of crisis communications. Apple of course has instances of crisis communications all the time. The Fox Con suicides of Edit’s supplier being a good recent example. On the flip side, Tedmon has also given a lecture inside Apple about the super market company A ; P, which was basically the Wal-Mart or the Safeway of its day, and completely crumbled and could not handle being at the top of the heap, which is surprisingly or not, a great concern to Apple’s senior leadership.

It’s paranoid enough to know that being on top is a difficult place.

Being on top is a difficult place, tell me that, Adam. Who do you think at Apple is the principle architect of these unique organizational structures? Was it Steve Jobs?

There’s absolutely no question that it was Steve Jobs. The company, he imprinted his DNA on Apple, a period full stop. And so, the great subject that we are going to explore over the next five years, that we’ll find out about over the next five years is, how well was he able to prepare the institution for his death.

And the founding of Apple University suggests that he had exactly that on his mind. And I’m channeling him, I’m not suggesting that this is what he said but he sought to figure out, well, how can I institutionalize my teachings that things that have worked, first of all so that there is a repository of information about how my team and I did these things, and how we structured the company, but also so that we can learn from each other about how to move forward.

What I discuss in the book is there are certain functions that Steve Jobs was intimately involved with when he was healthy on a day in day out basis, advertising copy would be an example of that. He was effectively the head of marketing in advertising for Apple. There are other aspects of the company that he wasn’t involved with for years, Apple was known in the supply chain world, for example, as being a first rate logistics company.

They know how to procure material, how to get the best price, how to forward plan what they’re going to need, and how to push their manufacturers, their suppliers to the manufacturer, what they want. So I bring this up as an example of something that should not experience a hiccup in his absence, even though he he definitely drove the creation of every last bit of it.

You think Apple watchers might learn from post start Russia after Stalin died or after some major dictator passed away. Successions are always tricky and more complicated than appear. Well it’s funny, I did not bring up, you’ve given me a good idea. I did not reference Stalin in the Look however I did reference companies like IBM after the Watsons or Walt Disney.

Walt Disney after Disney. There is no blue print for how a company can thrive without its how it’s visionary when it is the, when that person is the single most important person. I debated this endlessly with my sources everybody has an opinion on this subject. One of my favorite quotes that gets to this is from a former senior software executive at Apple, Avie Tevanian, who said to me–he said this before Steve Jobs died, by the way.

He said, after Steve Jobs is gone, the competition still will not have Steve.

Well, Avie was Steve Job’s best man at his wedding, wasn’t he?

I believe, I think I read that in Walter Isaacson’s book.

After Starling died there was an attempt at collective leadership. Is that possible at Apple through things like their top hundred organization?

Well, I’ll give you a nuanced answer, that there was a form of collective leadership under Steve Jobs, in that he had a very powerful group of about 10 executives that he called the executive team who ran the company under his direction. Now, he was very involved everything that they did, but they were and are very powerful as well.

And then…

Who are they?
I want names.

Oh, sure. I mean, his long time chief operating officer, Tim Cook, now the CEO, has effectively run the company for the past three or four years, with Steve Jobs acting more as creative genius. We know about Johnny Ive who is the design chief at Apple, who had this sort of a vulcan mind meld with Jobs.

He’s formerly a designer, which Jobs was not so he’s responsible for the look and feel of Apple products and is still very much there. Scott Forstall is the last a series of senior software executives who is responsible for the IOS. And he’s last in the sense that he happened to be in this job when When Steve Jobs died, clearly other people could have done this job if they had been the person doing it.

So, there are others like this, these are the senior leaders of Apple. What we don’t know is a complete unknown, is how Tim Cook will be, how dictatorial he’ll be able to be as CEO. So for example, we assume that Tim Cook doesn’t have design aesthetic that Steve Jobs did. Nobody had the design aesthetic that Steve Jobs did.

Now you asked me about the Top 100. This is something that I uncovered in my for fortune earlier in 2011. Jobs would have a meeting about every year, not on any strict schedule the Top 100. He would bring together a group of 100 executives, not necessarily the top 100 by rank because this is how Jobs did things.

They unwritten car system right? Yes. This is what you describe, it says unwritten car system. Yes, absolutely. So just because you were a VP didn’t mean that you’d be invited to the top one hundred hundred if you were a designer or director somewhere that he thought, especially an engineer, that he thought was influential.

He would invite you to this exclusive retreat, where he he would show you everything that was going to happen at Apple for the next 12-18 months, and he would invite other executives who were working on initiatives that he thought were important to give the presentations as well. So for example, the first iPod was revealed at a Top 100 meeting.

The retail store concept was as well. The iPad2 with its cute magnetic cover was shown at the last Top 100 that Steve Jobs presided over.

Adam, some of your book is quite, I’m gonna say shocking, but certainly incredibly controversial. You compare this closed caste system in some ways to a terrorist organization. What did you mean by that?

Well, I mean it in the sense, non-judgmentally, that the concept behind a terrorist cell–and the same thing would be true of a resistance cell if you want to cast it in a slightly more favorable light–is that the cell members are not given certain information that they don’t necessarily need in the case of the French resistance or Al Queda, it’s because if they are captured, they might reveal information that they shouldn’t.

In the case of Apple the cell members, i.e. program managers, are working on a discrete project. It’s not that they’re going to be captured tortured of course, but they certainly can’t go blab, to their friends, to the public, to the press, to a blogger; something that they don’t know. Adam you argue in the book that the company had, what you call, a confrontational workplace culture, and one of your sources said that everyone was always at each others throats.

Might it be fair to say that the company simply reflected its co-founder and CEO? I think that would be completely fair. There’s a cup half full and a cup half empty way of looking at this and the cup half empty is It can be a horribly stessful place to work, a real pressure cooker where your feeling might get hurt.

The, the frequently path full way of looking at it is that, people told me over and over that these arguments, while they might be personal, were always about product, and about data and that if you made a compelling case in these knock-down-drag-out arguments Answer this, why when you were arguing what’s best for the product, you would win the argument.

Now, that’s excepting if you were having the argument with Steve Jobs. but, yes, his reputation, and we saw in Walter Isaacson’s biography, is that he didn’t care much what people thought, what people felt about him or if he hurt people’s feelings. That was secondary to accomplishing was he was trying to accomplish, and that absolutely is the the culture of Apple and that’s not just with how employees treat each other but how Apple treats everybody else that deals with from suppliers to journalists to with a great exception, by the way, well some would argue with customers as well things like well, you want a removable battery?

Tough. That’s not how we do it, but at the same time Apple works very hard to delight it’s customers in an emotional way, which is, you know, another subject.

Would it be fair, Adam, to say that the senior executive at Apple who most exemplifies those “qualities” in a post Job’s company is Scott forced on and is that why you’re predicting that Forster will be the cruise chef in this post-Stalin apple, that he will be the guy to take over ultimately?

Well first of all by By the accounts that I’ve heard, he is a kinder gentler person that Steve Jobs was.

But that’s not hard right? he’s very political, but not overtly nasty or difficult. On the contrary, many people told me that he’s a kind, caring person I am not predicting necessarily that Forstall will be the next CEO of Apple, I am saying that he certainly could be he’s certainly positioned to because of his age, he’s 42 or 43, because of his skills which are, he’s a software engineer and that’s a skill that is highly valued at Apple and because he’s somebody who seems to get the whole picture.

But I’m not prepared today to suggest that Tim Cook’s days as CEO at Apple are numbered on the contrary, when he became CEO, when Steve Jobs died. Actually 6 weeks before Steve Jobs died and Apple made Cook CEO, they gave him a ten-year stock package, worth at the time, in the neighborhood of 400 million dollars, with half of it vesting after 5 years and the second half after another five years.

So, he has incentive to stick around. The board seems to want him to stick around for a while. I think he has a minimum of three years before there would be a different CEO at Apple.

Well, Scott, well not Scott and not Scott Forstall, Adam Lashinsky, the guy who got inside Apple and survived to tell his story in his new book Inside Apple, which tells another truth, a parallel truth, to Walter Isaacson’s book about Steve Jobs. Thank you so much for appearing on Tech-Crunch TV and I hope you’ll come back in three, at least three to five years, to tell us what the post Steve Jobs world really looks like.

Thank you.