The worst type of case study

The chapter on Apple in our book was, without doubt, the most difficult part to write.  How do you make sense of a company that is so successful, yet fails to follow most of the Crowd Surfing principles?  Apple is a closed culture.  They don’t tolerate bloggers (either internal or external), show little interest in creative collaboration (although there are signs that this is starting to change with some of the iPhone Apps initiatives) and deploy a very old fashioned model of top-down communication.  Either our theories are wrong, or Apple is the exception that (hopefully) proves the rule.

I was therefore relieved to read Bryan Appleyard’s review of Leander Kahney’s new book on Steve Jobs, in which he says: “Most of these (the lessons from Steve) are harmless, but ‘Be a despot’ (“It’s okay to be an asshole, as long as you’re passionate about it”) and ‘Don’t listen to your customers’ might well prove fatal in the wrong hands.  In fact, I’m pretty sure that any company that wasn’t run by Jobs pursuing these tips would be brought to its knees in a fortnight.  Job’s Apple is not a repeatable formula because Job’s isn’t.”  Thanks Bryan.  Our belief in the merits of crowd surfing lives to fight another day.