"Employee Development"

Any company that plans long term success needs to develop its people, or at least one would think so.  You often hear companies mouth the words, that their people are their greatest assets.  Apple has been in business for a long time. Has Apple done a good job of developing its own employees?  Are corporate values driving Apple's success or is the iPod just masking Apple's failure as a computer company.  Do people leave Apple happy and willing to be a part of the Apple extended family in their retirement?  Are Apple employees really valued for their skills?  Does Apple really listen to customers and employees?  Are the products that Apple delivers the result of extensive customer testing or are they just thrown over the wall on sometimes unsuspecting customers?

Long ago in the late eighties, Apple was one of the top places to work.  Things have changed a lot  and though Apple is still an exciting company, at least in field sales, it is one of the most challenging and difficult companies to endure in an industry known for tough jobs.  An Apple field sales person is often caught between a very hard rock, Apple the company, and a customer who really would like to buy Apple products, but only if those products meet their needs.  Resolving those needs and delivering those capabilities to customers are really how Apple employees grow, develop, and eventually end up leaving the company.

When you are part of something for so long, sometimes it is hard to see the changes which take place.  There was a time at Apple when employee development was important at Apple.  There were even courses for people who wanted to become managers. In those days it was no uncommon to think of Apple as a career.  There was something of a development path for field employees. Those courses and many others disappeared in the nineties.  It was my mid-nineties boss who told me that an attitude had developed that if you had stayed with the company, you were not as capable a person as those who had left and perhaps become back.  It is a very telling statement.  Thus internal development lost favor at Apple but once you understand the whole story, that will come as no surprise.

Those employees and customers who hung with Apple during the dark days saw an Apple struggling to survive.  Being an Apple employee in those days was little fun.  Apple's survival was always the elephant in the room.  Those that stayed loyal during this period did so more out of an affection for the technology than for the company.  Many loyal people were shown the door as management lurched from one reorganization to another.  Corporate presentations always talked about the stability of management.  The translation for that was that none of the executives ever lost their jobs in all of the layoffs.  Customers will tell you that reps sometimes changed in mid-year and that many good reps either got tired of it and left or were shown the door.

All struggling companies go through this so it is hard to fault Apple for laying people off in order to survive.  However, the twisted logic that devalued those people who had managed to keep Apple customers happy through all the turmoil is hard to understand. It is impossible that these veterans were not as good as those people who chose to leave the company for easier jobs only to come back when then things looked brighter at Apple. Certainly loyalty in staying with your company during tough times shows a strength of character that one would hope could be valued.  Unfortunately that is not the case at Apple.  This is something that is really hard to understand unless you really know the inner thoughts of Apple.

Understanding how Apple values its customers really sheds some light on how Apple treats its own employees. Customers to Apple are transactions.  Other than a few who have personal relationships with Steve, most customers are valued only as long as they also make no waves and keeping buying products without question and regularly.

Perhaps it hit me directly when I was part of a well done but almost pointless training at Apple that had as its final exercise a presentation to a team of executives about an idea that might help Apple grow.  My field sales team had just gone through an exercise where we had collected video input from a number of key customers who had some suggestions to make Apple stronger in the enterprise.

My presentation team in the training made the mistake of playing the video plea of a long time customer to fix a key problem that was in effect impacting almost every enterprise customer of the government sales team and those of other Apple sales organizations even those calling on education. It was causing many customers to consider getting rid of their few remaining Macs.  The customer was a long time customer who purchased millions of dollars of Macs every year.  His request was simply that Apple needed to work closer with a competitor and deliver a product that integrated better with that competitor's products.  The Apple senior VP hit the ceiling during the video clip presentation.  He practically accused the customer of whining and not knowing anything.  In fact our VP said that his team had already fixed the problem.  The Apple VPs rant was severe, and the external people running the training were stunned especially when the VP said he could not stand customers who said they might have to move away from Apple if the problems were not fixed.  They certainly could not understand a senior VP ignoring a plea from a senior CIO. If they could have only known how many times that has happened at Apple.

The telling part of this is a customer request was considered a threat to Apple.  It was a reasonable request which a number of other customers were also making.  To understand you have to look at customers from Apple's perspective.  Apple doesn't make products to please customers.   Apple makes products to please Apple.  When they happen to match the needs of customers the products are successful. Remember "customers don't know what to buy we have to tell them" and "if we made what customers asked us for, they would want something else by the time we got it built."  How dare a customer directly tell the almighty Apple what is needed in a product.

Now there is one caveat to this, a customer who has a purchase order in hand for millions of dollars can leverage that into Apple being willing to do something if it will result in that particular transaction going to Apple just don't expect a real long term partnership out of the deal.

The other interesting thing about the Apple VP rant at the long term customer's request, is that the Apple VP was completely wrong and the customer was right.  However, as is often the case at Apple up is down, and daylight is night inside One Infinite Loop.

In fact the customer's need was so great and so common across so many other customers that I took one of my field technical resources and let him dedicate his time to creating the functionality that the customers desperately needed in order to keep the Macs from being thrown out of their enterprises.  It took him over six months to get the basic functionality done. It is an interesting commentary on a company when a field organization has to write code that a key VP denies is needed.  Of course it was needed and is a very successful and highly touted part of the operating system today.

So if a customer buying millions asking for needed features is dismissed as a whiner, you can imagine how employees trying to bring forward customer requests are treated.  So if employees that listen to customers and become customer advocates cannot thrive at Apple, what type of employee thrives at Apple.

First and foremost, no one who hopes to work his way up through the ranks will be happy in the new Apple.  Promotions from within at Apple at least in the field sales force are almost unheard of in the last seven or eight years. However, plenty of managers have been brought in over the years.

Not surprisingly the ones who have come in are predisposed to having all the right answers.  They come to Apple with the same hubris that a teenager has.  They know everything that they need to know when they arrive on the job.  In fact most of them seem to indicate they were born with all the knowledge that they will ever need.  The other characteristic that they have in common is blind loyalty to whomever hired them.  What they are told needs doing, they will do without question and if necessary in whatever unethical way they happen to stumble upon.   If they are told that their sales force is a bunch of under performing slugs, they will believe that and act upon it as if it were the truth.  Finally while they seem to have been taught how to listen, they have actually just been taught how to ignore what they hear from below and do what they have been told from above without any question.

The typical Apple hired gun manager is loyal to himself, his buddies, and his boss.  Employees are one way transactions just as customers are transactions when they buy products.  Employees sell products, customers buy products.  Management tells employees what to do and customers buy what they are told.  It's actually pretty simple except it doesn't work very well or Apple would have far greater market share than 2% in computers.

Don't fall into the trap that Apple's success is because Apple knows what it is doing.  Apple hit a home run with the iPod.  Steve Jobs may be genius for making that happen though some lucky circumstances may have more to do with it than Steve, but he is a failure if you measure him against how much market share he has been able to achieve for one of the best computer platforms in the world running what is arguably the best and most secure operating system in the world.

One of the core reasons behind Apple's failure is the way employees are mistreated and the way customer requests are ignored. While Apple has successfully leveraged Open Source software (almost without notice to most customers) to deliver great functionality to OS X, it has in many cases like the example I used ignored and even made fun of legitimate customer requests that would have helped create more demand for OS X and Macintoshes.

It is easy to ignore customer demands if you are completely convinced that you know better than the customer what they want.  It is easy to listen but not act on employee requests if you are born with all the knowledge you need and find it impossible to learn anything from those who work for you.

All this could make Apple seem like a terrible place to work which it isn't if you love the technology and can manage to take refuge in your good customers.  In fact the key to Apple employee satisfaction below the executive level is love of the technology.  In fact many employees love the technology so much that they will put up with almost anything.  The bad thing is that management not only understands this but leverages it to the hilt.  You can put in place almost any kind of management team as long as they don't interfere too much with the field sales employee love of technology and dedication to their customers.

Often managers are brought into Apple with almost no Apple product knowledge. Some are barely computer literate.   Many spend six months to a year just understanding Apple technologies.  Of course while they are doing this, employees continue on their merry way selling Apple technologies.  One might wonder why you would bring in people to sell your technology who have no knowledge of your technology.  Of course it is because the people who have been selling your technology don't really know how to sell it and the 2% market share is really their fault.  You don't value those sales people you have because they are also customers of the technology and love it so much that they are just as blind and worthless as your customers. A side note which almost proves the case is that most of the time Apple employees now get discounts very similar to preferred customers, not the really special employee pricing that the rule in Apple's early days.

Apple believes selling Apple products is like selling widgets.  This is a really unusual view for a company who thinks their products are very special. Unfortunately it is true that Apple itself does not understand how its products are really sold.  The general belief is that most non-Apple using customers are unenlightened and if a lazy Apple sales person can be convinced to make a sales call and actually talk to a customer that the customer will fall all over themselves to buy Apple products. Apple sales reps will tell you that it is far from that easy.

While it may not be quite as bad as that, that element of our products are so great that they sell themselves is always in the background when Apple executives think about sales and their sales people. Apple believes its products uncontaminated by customer input are so good that any idiot of a sales person can sell them so they do not need customer relationships or long term employees who really understand both the products and the customers or marketing behind the computer products.  The proof of how wrong Apple is about selling its own products is the many great relationships and employees that ended up with Dell and other competitors because Apple thought they could outsource their sales to agents or do without the great sales reps who had created the sales relationships.

Its a very simple formula, make the insanely great products and wait for the customers to drive to the warehouse and beg for the products. Any sales person can get in the way of the customer and collect the order at least in the Cupertino fantasy land.

The real truth is that selling Apple products is probably one of the toughest sales jobs on earth.  You are on your own most of the time. If you make a mistake, the corporate tendency is to hang  you out to dry or just plain hang you.  Remember executives at Apple and managers make no mistakes.  The products are perfect so any mistakes must be made by the sales force.

I can remember when Apple got back into servers for the third time. Servers had become very important to most corporations.  Apple descended from on high to deliver a wondrous server product to customers who initially snapped up a number of them to evaluate.

Then sales slowed.  Sales slowed because customers were evaluating the servers and finding that things were not exactly as advertised.  In fact Apple sales reps were finding out that things were not exactly as they had been told either.  Of course Apple's natural reaction was to call the sales force in for training on how to sell the servers since product marketing had determined that such a perfect product as this could not possibly be at fault.  Of course in a case of ultimate irony the first thing done was to ask the field sales force how they were selling the product so they could present to themselves how they were selling the product.

So all needs were satisfied.  Product marketing could walk away with the perfect product.  The clueless sales force got their training and management's impression of the sales force was confirmed.

The same kind of behavior happens in many products that Apple delivers or in deals that they close.  In looking for a new career, I happened across the company that saved Apple's rear in its first large scale one on one initiative in K-12.  Apple management had made some commitments and agreed to meeting all the customer requirements because the customer was waving a multi-million dollar purchase order in front of their nose.  Unfortunately Apple could not deliver everything they promised and only a very smart services company could actually make things work because they had the real world experience that Apple lacked.

Even today, Apple does not really test for enterprise capabilities. They often leave it to the unsuspecting first customer to have a field trial that a company more attuned to customer partnership might have done before marketing the product.  Usually the first sales rep to try to actually make the product work as specified finds out the real problems and if they are lucky enough to find a customer dedicated enough to Apple, they might be able to pull off a sale which by its nature forces some of the hidden problems in Apple's products to be fixed.  Of course the products should have been tested and fixed before they came to market, but that is not Apple's way.  I can remember selling some servers to a large government agency and it taking over a year to figure out some problems because our engineers had never really tested the products in a true production environment. Then there is the case of an enterprise deployment that we were bidding on and I found that Apple had only tested the product with an installation totaling three systems, which was no where near the 2,000 systems that our customer needed.  I arranged a test on five hundred systems, and we found many things that Apple had never run into in their huge deployment of three systems. Had we deployed 2,000 systems it would have been a disaster.

So what is the typical Apple employee cycle of development.  They often come to the company full of great idealism.  They find some absolutely great people, and probably some managers who while they may look good on the surface, are likely only trying to find that next resource to use up.

They find lots of technology and some unbelievably hard working people.  They find some customers that absolutely will buy Apple no matter what and then they find the customers who have had enough of Apple's dismissive ways.  Those are the customers who dared to make waves or ask for a feature that was absolutely critical to their enterprise.   You find customers who were burned by Apple's in and out trips to the enterprise market and who are still wary of Apple's commitment to the enterprise.  You find many customers who love the product and hate Apple the company, and more more you find customers who while they don't care much for Microsoft they don't see Apple as a viable alternative.

Most Apple employees love the products so much that they put up with the company.  Apple employees are by and large as dedicated as Apple customers who typically adore their field sales people.  However, Apple employees really do not have a development plan.  Oh they might get some sales training which assumes they know nothing about selling. They might get some product training which tells them the product marketing "truth" about what they are supposed to tell, but they rarely get what they need from Apple including information about what works and doesn't work on Apple products.

Many Apple employees get the development they need from interactions with customers and trying, sometimes desperately, to meet those same needs which are being ignored by their own corporation.  People at Apple become experts by doing a job made difficult by a corporation that fails to appreciate the expertise of the people they deliberately ignore.

When Apple employees get to the point that they try to make waves for their customers or heaven forbid challenge product marketing on some of the hidden problems that the products have or even challenge their all knowing manager, they have developed as far as they can at Apple. It is time to leave.

Some are pushed into jobs which they can't stand and they leave. Some get frustrated and leave themselves.  One of the best young sales people that I have ever seen was driven out of Apple by a manager who cared only for his own rear and refused to step up to the plate and resolve real customer and employee issues.  I know a great older sales person who left because he just could not take it any more.

Then there are the others who are perhaps more vocal at pushing customer issues or standing up for employee rights.  Those folks are force fed a cup of hemlock one way or the other at Apple and then terminated.

There are very few happy retirements at Apple below the executive level so there is no army of ex-Apple employees out there to help close a sales.  If anything most of the ex-Apple people leave with the thought, "love the products, hate the company."

This is perhaps the saddest commentary on a company which in theory should be a great story for employees.  Though I don't know as much about the corporate development side, I will close with one last story.  I knew an Apple student rep who had a chance to work for Apple or Microsoft.  He loved the Apple products but when he asked a member of an Apple programming team about working at Apple, it came across very clearly to him that working at Apple meant giving up everything for Apple.  As I heard it related, he said Apple is all about Apple and never about the employee.  He went to Microsoft because he felt that individuals and their talents were important at Microsoft.

I don't know if he was right about Microsoft, but I do know that anyone who has every worked for Apple below the executive level has likely given more than they gotten back because it is all about Apple.  That doesn't mean that working at Apple wasn't a great trip for almost all of them.  They will tell you it was an amazing journey.  The unfortunate thing is that the journey almost always ends with disillusionment and sadness instead of pride of accomplishment.  Of course that changes if you are an Apple executive in which case the story ends in riches and if you are rich, I guess you don't have to care about all the people you have mismanaged over the years or the market share that might have been.