From Steve Jobs Down to the Janitor: What Fortune's 2011 'Inside Apple' Revealed

From the archive: first published September 21, 2011 — weeks after Tim Cook succeeded Steve Jobs as Apple's CEO, and less than two weeks before Jobs's death.

In May 2011, Fortune published what was then the most penetrating portrait ever written of Apple at the height of the Steve Jobs era: Adam Lashinsky's cover story "Inside Apple," reporting on how America's most admired — and most secretive — big company really worked.

Lashinsky's central insight was structural. Apple, then the world's most valuable technology company, was organized not like a conglomerate but like a startup: Jobs ran it as a collection of small, intensely accountable teams built around a single organizing principle that ran from the CEO to the loading dock — the "DRI," or "directly responsible individual." Every task had exactly one name next to it, and when something failed, there was no ambiguity about whose failure it was.

The story's most quoted passage concerned the 2008 failure of MobileMe, the email-and-sync service Apple had launched alongside the iPhone 3G. Users complained of lost mail and spotty syncing, and reviewers panned it. According to Lashinsky's account, Jobs summoned the MobileMe team to the company's Town Hall auditorium, asked them what the service was supposed to do, and demanded to know why it did not do that. He berated the team for tarnishing Apple's reputation and replaced its leadership on the spot — a half-hour meeting that became legend inside and outside Cupertino.

A second anecdote explained the article's headline idea. Jobs gave incoming vice presidents a speech, reportedly titled "the difference between the janitor and the vice president," whose message was that the janitor may offer excuses when things go wrong, but senior people may not. As Jobs put it, somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering — and that line, he told new VPs, is crossed the moment they take the job.

The piece landed at a moment when its central question was about to become urgent: could Apple function without Jobs? Published while Jobs was on medical leave and Tim Cook ran day-to-day operations, it read as a portrait of a company engineered around one man's judgment — and an open question about what would remain once he was gone.

Editor's note: this article was rewritten during our editorial review. The original 2011 version reproduced Fortune's cover story verbatim and broke off mid-sentence; the text above is an original summary of Adam Lashinsky's reporting.