Apple hits $1.000.000.000.000

How cool is that ??   And last I saw it pays about 7 bucks per quarter or something ?  Cool beans.

All right. I'll just have to come right out and say it, subtle nudging only causes misunderstandings.

The point here isn't an incredibly rich tech corporation. The point is that it's Apple. Apple, with the loyal following sometimes bordering on religious cult. Others have achieved brand loyalty, but never as strong, and never before on such as massive scale as to dominate the entire world economy. That's why the figure with all the zeros is significant.

It's a unique phenomenon in history. And that's Steve Jobs, nobody else. Tim Cook is just riding the wave, and it's still strong. How did Steve do it? Where did he find the holy grail that everybody's been out looking for?

There was an interesting article on the BBC site yesterday about bullying in the workplace, and it cited Steve Jobs, as well as Elon Musk, and Amazon's Jeff Bezos as being 'not renowned for their friendly or warm leadership styles'. It also says of Jobs that:

Numerous talented people, including his co-founders, reportedly left Apple because of Steve Jobs’ management style.

We have a saying here — or rather the Maori do:

He aha te mea nui o te ao

What is the most important thing in the world?

He tangata, he tangata, he tangata

It is the people, it is the people, it is the people

In organisations like Apple, their human resource is often their biggest cost, and they need to get the best return on that cost.  I was so touched by the article that I wrote to its author Jeff Pfeffer, with my own experience at Ford Research/Product development.  When I started there nepotism and Freemasonry were key to advancement.  Middle management were a nightmare.  Usually stupid, with animal cunning, and it was not a nice working environment.  Then along came the Japanese motor industry who could get a new vehicle from concept to showroom floor in six months to a year, where we took three years — we had to change or go under.  From this point the old wood was cut away, and some very clever people were promoted.  They were quietly spoken, and utterly focused.  Everyone's input was valued, and we evolved to producing much more output, with far less people.

Did Steve Jobs make Apple the most valuable company in the world, or is it Tim Cook's leadership?  I don't know much about Tim, but the few links I found all seemed to suggest a very different style of management, and it seems to have been effective.

Instead of simply continuing the legacy of Jobs' autocratic leadership style, Cook has played to his strengths and placed emphasis on advancing cooperation among Apple's arsenal of talent. This is extremely indicative of the democratic style of management, which encourages consensus building, particularly among high-level employees prior to mutually consented decision making.

It's worth noting that Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen worked for Apple before moving to Adobe in 1998, and has apparently bought much of his leadership style from Apple to Adobe.  My favourite quote from this interview is:

I like to say that if you can connect all the dots between what you see today and where you want to go, then it’s probably not ambitious enough or aspirational enough.

That is a theme that has persisted throughout the 'Something For The Weekend' threads.  People are producing images when they initially didn't know how they could be done.  They had to work it out, and learn new skills, which is both a pleasure, as well as expanding your  Content Creation tool box (people are not just using Photoshop.  Various 3D apps, and After Effects, are two of the other tools I know are being used, and I plan to start using Animator for my GIFs).

It is food for thought. When I was around 18 or so, before getting drafted in 69, and from Long Island suburb, and going to a community college in Nassau at night, I worked for Merrill Lynch as a 'buy-in clerk' in bond operations. Basically a detective in house to work on failed trades. In those days it took 5 days to consummate a trade ( deliver or receive). I had access and security clearance for vault and all departments ( legal transfer, accounting, coupons (unregistered coupon bonds), etc. There were 4 of us in the company (on Pine Street, which was owned by Merrill, for the whole world). I was lucky and had a vice president (head of bond operations) as a friend via wives working together at some airline ( Pan Am).

This was so many years ago that you would not recognize the financial instruments and indexes and short selling, credit default swaps and Collateralized debt obligations, or half the stuff going on nowadays when I was working there. They didn't exist.

Back then people actually rode bicycles around the streets to deliver stocks and bonds ( the real physical documents) to and from brokers. It was very busy. This is before the NYSE went public and merged with other places around world.

One thing that became extremely ( and I do mean Extremely) obvious is that what happens on paper is often very divorced from the real world of providing product and service and generating good things for the "people" of the world.  For example, a person who plants a seed, grows a corn plant, and picks the corn and puts it on the 'market' ( sells the corn made), is the REAL world. Someone who short sells on a 'bet' that some company stock will go down within 5 days ( back then the trade failed after 5 days) was just on paper and like being at the horse track. Nothing to do with real products, people working, people getting benefit of EATING corn that is affordable, etc.

In today's world of "global economy" it is pretty obvious that what is good for some is NOT GOOD for others. There are zillions of reasons for this. Too complicated to get into. But the economy is man made. It is NOT nature. It is not written in stone like the 10 commandments.

It is a fiction made up to facilitate financial investment to accommodate risk vs. hope.

To say that Apple is doing great due to current stock value ( times x number of shares) is like saying TULIPS ARE WORTH $100.00 EACH.

Who cares ?  It has no real value unless you own shares and you have the shares X whatever dividend it pays per quarter.

In my opinion it (the company in general ) is just a fad that spread out across the world via iPhone sales, where people (especially poor countries with no twisted pair ( telephone), no cable (internet, tv, telephone), and no NOTHIN but cell towers or maybe satellites. I could not care less about their growth selling stupid iphones.

So you get an iPhone in some blighted place in India, and somehow you get a signal, and you play 'angry birds' or you sign onto facebook. Who cares ??

It's just a stupid fad.