Leading Apple With Steve Jobs: Management Lessons From a Controversial Genius

Continuing the Tradition

Now that the company has its own retail outlets, it includes customers in company celebrations. May 2011 marked the 10th anniversary of the Apple stores, and the company decided to celebrate the 10 years by introducing to customers to a whole new retail experience called Apple Store 2.0—a name suggesting that the stores are, to Apple, in the same class as every one of the carefully nurtured products: due for regular upgrades. The 2.0 stores included start-up sessions for new customers, along with the introduction of new sound systems.

Just as everyone on the Mac team was given a Mac with their name on the front of it as recognition of their contribution to making the product happen, Steve did the same thing, only better, when the iPhone was introduced: this time around, every employee—including the many people working in the Apple stores—was given a new iPhone.

At the center of this tradition were the huge discounts for employees at the Apple employees’ store on the campus in Cupertino. Besides buying for themselves, employees can buy computers and other Apple products at significant discounts in limited quantities for a friend or family member. There was also a way to recommend a donation to a school, so many computers were directed to the schools of employees’ children. Think what it means to an Apple parent to go into a school and see an Apple computer on the kids’ desks, as well as in the school’s computer lab. This is another form of recognition that ...