Jeffrey L. Cruikshank - The Apple Way: 12 Management Lessons from the Worlds Most Innovative Company

Jeffrey L. Cruikshank

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To Judy Kohn, who figured out Apple way before I did.

Jeffrey L. Cruikshank was the co-founder of Kohn Cruikshank, Inc., a Boston-based consulting firm that served corporate and institutional clients for more than twelve years. In September of 2001, Kohn Cruikshank moved to Milton and became The Cruikshank Company, Inc.

Cruikshank is a graduate of Amherst College, and worked with a number of companies and schools in the Boston area in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1980, he became the editor of the Harvard Business School Bulletin, beginning a relationship with that school that has continued since then, and has led to many other engagements in the worlds of education and business.

In addition to helping shape key communications for dozens of public and private institutions, Cruikshank is the author or co-author of numerous books of interest to managers. These include histories of the Harvard Business School, New England Electric, Cummins Engine Company, The Weather Channel, and Perdue Farms. He has also written a book on corporations and architecture for Herman Miller, Inc.; the definitive guide to art in public places (Going Public); and books on numerous other subjects, ranging from logistics in the Gulf War (Moving Mountains) to entrepreneurship (Low Risk, High Reward) to the inner workings of the commercial real estate industry (The Real Estate Game). In 2005, he published his first murder mystery (Murder at the B-School).

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Apple thought they had it right, this time.

The date: January 19, 1983. The place: the Flint Center at De Anza College, less than a mile down the road from Apples headquarters on Bandley Drive in Cupertino, California. The event: the formal unveiling of Apples new flagship product at the companys annual meeting.

The product was a computer, of course, and it was called the Lisa, whichdepending on who was doing the explainingeither stood for local integrated software architecture, or was the name of Apple cofounder Steve Jobss daughter, or both.

The Lisa had been in development since the fall of 1978, when Jobs began focusing on a new computer that would replace the aging Apple II. At that time, Jobs envisioned a machine that would sell for $2,000, and be aimed primarily at the business market. The new machine would be only an evolutionary step beyond what Apple was already producing. In other words, it would be another heavy, clunky, small machinesmall being only a relative termwith a built-in green-phosphor display, a more or less conventional user interface, and so on. Nevertheless, Jobs had high hopes for the new machine, which he hoped would shore

So, planning began along those lines. Then, about a year laterin November 1979fate intervened. Against his better judgment, Jobs was persuaded to visit the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). The PARC laboratories have since achieved legendary status as a place of astonishing innovation, a place of bubbling technological ferment. But back then, it took some arm-twisting to get Jobs to stop by the sprawling, modernistic complex at 3333 Coyote Hill Road in nearby Palo Alto. By all accounts, Jobs didnt think that stodgy old Xerox had much to teach Apple Computer, which was then flying high: growing at astronomical rates, getting ready for its second private placement, and generally (pun unavoidable) the apple of Wall Streets eye.