Adam Lashinsky Discusses “Inside Apple” at Authors@Google Transcript

Adam Lashinsky covers Silicon Valley and Wall Street for FORTUNE Magazine. Here in this talk, he talks about his 2012 bestseller Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired – and Secretive – Company Really Works.

TRANSCRIPT:

Adam Lashinsky – Author

A couple of caveats I’m going to steal a line from a telephone executive who would like to say I know it’s common to ask people to shut down their phones but he liked to hear the sound of ringing and so he encouraged people to leave their phones on. Rather than ask you to put down your laptops or your smartphones I will say that if you are looking into a screen I’m assuming you’re going to be posting to Google+ about how interesting this is and encouraging people to buy the book and that’ s just fine with me.

My other caveat is that although I do have direct comparisons in the book between Apple and Google and they will be part of my comments and I am happy to discuss them with you in the Q&A, I didn’t spend the last year of my life studying Google, I spent the last year of my life studying Apple. So beyond the conclusions that I am willing to draw or the observations that I am willing to make about the comparisons of the two companies, in particular cultural issues, I don’t want to put too much of the compare and contrast burden on me for comparing Apple and Google, I’ll put that burden on you and I’ll tell you about Apple and leave you to make your own conclusions about the differences between the two companies.

One of my major epiphanies in working on the book and on the article in Fortune Magazine before it is just how differently Apple does business from the way everybody else does business. And indeed how the Apple way of doing business is different from what’s taught in business school. And Steve Jobs was quite clear on this, he didn’t particularly care for business school and he didn’t particularly care for MBAs in general. And part of the reason for doing Apple University over the past four years was to, as he put it, “To try to create our own kind of MBA.”