Apple Organizational Culture – Secrecy and Maximum Benefit from Human Resources

Corporate culture of Apple plays an important role in efficiently maintaining its operations in the global scale with 164,000 full-time equivalent employees.[1] Apple organizational culture used to have a reputation of being harsh, demanding and intimidating under the leadership of founder and late CEO Steve Jobs. However, it can be argued that since assuming the top leadership in 2011, Tim Cook has invested considerable efforts towards ‘humanising’ the brand. Specifically, unlike his predecessor, Tim Cook has spoken out about human rights, privacy, immigration reform and environmental issues.[2]

Apple corporate culture integrates the following important features:

1. Creativity and innovativeness. Apple pursues the business strategy of product differentiation with the focus on the design and functionality of products and services. An effective implementation of this strategy in practice requires a high level of creativity and innovativeness from employees at all levels. Accordingly, in order to encourage their employees to be more creative and innovative, the company attempts to develop relevant working environment. Creative design of Apple Campus, informal dress codes and creatively designed working space can be mentioned to illustrate this point.

2. Working under pressure. Ability to work under pressure is a must-have skill for Apple employees at all levels. In fact, it is challenging to work for the first company ever to be valued at $3 trillion. Most projects have strict and short deadlines and working long hours is a norm in the company. CEO Tim Cook sets example in terms of his loyalty to the company and working long hours. He is known for sending emails to employees at 4:30 am. Moreover, Sunday is a work night for many managers at Apple because of the executive meeting the next day. Not everyone can sustain to work at such an intense rate. But employees who survive within the first couple of years usually come to love working for Apple and very often they become world class specialists on their field.

3. A high level of secrecy. High level of secrecy is an important feature of Apple organizational culture. It has been noted that “Apple engineers, even senior engineers, have no idea what a final Apple product will look like until it is launched. The people who work on the software have no idea what the hardware is like, and the hardware guys have no idea of the software”[3] The multinational technology company maintains high level of secrecy in order to protect innovative features and capabilities of its products from competitors and press.

At Apple, employees sign project-specific non-disclosure agreements and within company premises their badges can open some doors, but not others[4]. While these methods effectively contribute to the bottom line, Apple’s organizational culture of high level of secrecy has it downsides as well. Specifically, high level of secrecy at work leads to information silos, discourages cross-department knowledge sharing and creates a rigid definition of roles that can limit employee creativity.

4. Focus on diversity and inclusion. Apple attempts to integrate diversity and inclusion as a cornerstone of its organizational culture. The multinational technology company has a post of vice president for diversity and inclusion, whose primary aim is to ensure diversity among the workforce at all levels.

In 2020 the company launched a USD100 million Racial Equity and Justice Initiative aimed to promote racial equity. Tim Cook, unlike his predecessor Steve Jobs, occasionally writes to internal and external stakeholders about the need for society to do more to push equality, especially for Black people. [5] He is the first openly gay CEO of a Fortune 500 company and he actively promotes diversity and inclusion values among the workforce at all levels.

Apple Inc. Report contains the above analysis of Apple organizational culture. The report illustrates the application of the major analytical strategic frameworks in business studies such as SWOT, PESTEL, Porter’s Five Forces, Value Chain analysis, Ansoff Matrix and McKinsey 7S Model on Apple. Moreover, the report contains analyses of Apple leadership, organizational structure and business strategy. The report also comprises discussions of Apple marketing strategy, ecosystem and addresses issues of corporate social responsibility.

[1] Annual Report (2022) Apple Inc.

[2] Dormehl, L. (2018) “Tim Cook vs. Steve Jobs: Who is Apple’s best CEO ever?” Cult of Mac, Available at: https://www.cultofmac.com/543227/tim-cook-vs-steve-jobs/

[3] Hattersley, L. (2016) “What is it really like to work for Apple: Surprising tales from inside Cupertino and the Apple Store” MacWorld, Available at: http://www.macworld.co.uk/feature/apple/what-is-it-really-like-work-for-apple-3600678/

[4] Maclnnis, M. (2017) “How I survived and thrived in Apple’s legendary environment of super-secrecy” Vox, Available at: https://www.vox.com/2017/9/11/16288896/apple-secrecy-inkling-culture-leadership-transparency-values

[5] Banjo, S. & Gurman, M. (2020) “Apple’s Diversity Chief Leaves as Companies Vow to Tackle Racism” Bloomberg, Available at: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-17/apple-s-diversity-chief-leaves-as-tech-firms-reckon-with-racism