Apple's Business Model and Success Factors

This assignment delves into the intricacies of Apple's business model, examining key factors contributing to its success. It analyzes the impact of corporate culture on sustainability, innovation strategies, leadership approaches, ethical considerations, and intellectual property protection. The analysis draws upon various scholarly sources and case studies to provide a comprehensive understanding of what makes Apple a global leader in the technology industry.

Running head: PROJECT REPORT
Tim Cook’s leadership and management style: Building his own legacy in Apple
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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PROJECT REPORT
Executive summary
This report deals with the technology company named Apple Inc. that started its journey
since 1976. It is mainly an American based corporation that has it’s headquarter in Cupertino
in California, United States. Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne are the founders
of this company. Under the leadership of Steve Jobs until 2011, Apple has expanded with 284
retail outlets across 10 different countries. However, after Jobs left Apple, Tim cook took his
charges and is the current CEO of this company. The leadership style of both these leaders is
poles apart and thus there are certain issues that came up in this organization. Here in this
report the main issues discussed are corporate culture issue and ethical issue that Apple is
facing. Therefore, the immediate step that Tim cook should take up is to have a task culture
in Apple than continuing with power culture imbibed by Jobs.

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Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................3
Background of the company......................................................................................................3
Problems that being analyzed.....................................................................................................5
Detailed analysis of the identified issues...................................................................................7
Recommendations....................................................................................................................10
Future plan of my career..........................................................................................................12
Conclusion................................................................................................................................13
References................................................................................................................................14

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Introduction
Tim cook is the CEO of Apple Inc. from 2011. However, before coming to this
position he was the Chief operating officer who was responsible for this organization’s
international sales and operations, involving their management of supply chain, sales
activities along with the service and support to their markets (Richtel & Chen, 2014).
Therefore, after Jobs Tim Cooks managerial style is that of Democratic style of leadership.
However, his style is unique as he maintained some practices of Jobs and along with that
mixed his style of leadership. According to the employees of Apple, they find Tim cook’s
style of management to be Charismatic as well as thoughtful (Hunter et al., 2012). Cook
mainly focuses of their already existing products and believes in encouraging their business
and their employees. Cook brought an extremely democratic change for the employees in
their organization that is emphasizing on proceeding cooperation among the collection of
talents Apple has. He inspired building consensus especially among the employees at the
higher levels before mutually accepted decision-making.
Background of the company
Apple Inc. designs and constructs computer hardware since 1976. It is an American
based corporation. This brand became popular after the launch of its Macintosh personal
computer line that was truly loyal to their users, iTunes media application as well as iPod
personal music player. Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne founded this company
and established their headquarters at Cupertino in California, United States (Purkayastha &
Sharma, 2016). Overall Apple possesses 284 retail outlets across 10 different countries. Slow
and steady they spread a unique status in the field of consumer electronics. Apple faced much
criticism from those who never used their products as being expensive while at the same time
those who used Apple become more loyal and passionate about their brand. Moreover, in

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2001 Apple came up with their iPod and overnight became the ruling market leader among
the music players. Their next move was to enter the phone industry, which they did in 2007
with their iPhones. However, with their so many products and services they have entered a
wide range of markets with strong competitors across all industries it has expanded its
business. In the personal computer markets, Apple’s biggest competitors are Dell, Acer, HP,
Sony and Toshiba, followed by Alphabet Inc., Samsung and Nokia in the Smartphone
industry (Hasan, 2012). The focus of Apple or their company’s Vision is Innovation, they
think that great products can be made with the greatest innovations thus; they must keep on
innovating the products they are bringing in the market. They want to make a noteworthy
contribution to the market they step in and that is why they never jump into many projects at
one time, rather they only focus in those projects which they think are important to them and
they can meaningful contributions towards it.
The pillars of Apples management started with Steve Jobs who has the greatest
contribution in this company. In search of perfection, Jobs controlled every feature of this
business. He exerted an Autocratic leadership or management style where he gave little or no
control to any of his employees, he himself too all the decisions, dictated how to work and
which paths to follow (Isaacson, 2012). Moreover, work became very much structured and
rigid. The employees were appointed in the organization as experts and where put into the
roles where their strengths and abilities can be used. Jobs had a very effective communication
skill through which he can advocate his company’s vision to their employees, shareholders
and customers. At 2011 when Jobs left Apple it was Tim cook who took the organization to
take it forward and started his journey as the current CEO. From the very beginning of Tim
Cook, becoming the new CEO people started comparing the managerial styles of both, but it
seems that employees appreciate the managerial style of Cook more than Jobs. Tim Cook is
being more socially responsible where he actually improved their work culture by

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understanding the workers needs in the organization (Lazonick, Mazzucato & Tulum, 2013).
However, due to these managerial changes by Cook the innovation strategy of Apple was
persuaded because it was highly rebellious under Jobs. Cook never displays his madness over
his employees and always has a gentle approach, he has an appearance of being calm and
composed but in actual he is worried about almost everything in the organization. Cook also
modified the marketing and cost cutting strategies of Apple because of his previous
experiences in IBM. According to Cook customers should be provided with simple solutions
to complex issues and to this happen, he organized campaigns to grand marketing, colossal
engineering feats and methods for cost savings.
Problems that being analyzed
Apple’s corporate culture has been the important factor for the success of the
organization. Corporate cultures are the determinant, which defines the capabilities in
assisting the changes, new policies and strategies. However, considering Apple their
employees are found to be successfully developed and merged into the corporate culture that
advances faster innovations. The culture in general contributes to the strengths of the business
along with the limits and challenges to the organization. Therefore, slowly Apple is fine-
tuning their corporate culture so that they can appropriately match the dynamic of their
business surroundings (Flamholtz & Randle, 2012). However, the corporate culture issues
that Apple stresses on secrecy and moderate degree of combativeness that rather bring big
challenges to their culture. Apple is already named as imbibed with a corporate culture of
secrecy, which is an integral part of the organizational strategy so that they can minimize the
thievery of Organization’s information or their intellectual property. Moreover, this type of
secrecy in the organization actually restricts the rapport among the employees. Along with
secrecy, another issue is moderate combativeness found in the corporate culture until today.

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Moderate combativeness is actually connected with the combative approach by Jobs. He uses
to challenge the employees casually just to check if they are at all worthy to work in Apple.
The major problem that moderate combativeness creates it make the employee’s moral is
decreased (Eccles, Ioannou & Serafeim, 2012). Therefore, there are major chances of
improvements so that Apple’s capabilities of human resources can be improved. Many
employees left Apple Company because they were unable to adjust with the dysfunctional
organizational culture and this is because Apple failed to show any kind of feeling towards
their employees rather than making them strictly follows their job. The existence of
dysfunctional corporate culture in Apple is mainly because here only the top most executive
has the greatest power to execute (Coleman, 2013).
Apart from the above discussed corporate cultural issues Apple being the world’s
most praised company has some ethical issues as well which can have far-reaching effects on
the future success of the organization. The very first ethical issue is with its product quality.
The brand name solely depends on the quality of the products so any fault can guide the
company to serious problems (Baase & Sen, 2013). However, because there is huge
competition Apple seem to launch a product without the detection of errors which has been
seen when they launched iphone 4. The customers have issues about reception problems.
Thus, product quality is one of the ethical issues faced by them. The next ethical challenge by
Apple is confidentiality, which is a major distress of Apple’s 2011 apple and Google
revealing of phone functions, which were, sell to collect data (Luchs et al., 2013). However,
the biggest issue was that according to the government and customers this is breaching of the
privacy of the users. There are many phones, which collects location information even after
the customer has put off that feature. Moreover, Apple defended about these software
solutions but still governments did not agree with them. Lastly, if the main ethical issues are
to be listed than according to the company the important ethical issues they face are honesty,

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respect, confidentiality and compliance. However, the biggest among these ethical issues that
Apple face with is transparency and leadership. Apple’s ethics and social responsibility and
ethics mainly depends on empowering their employees, labour & human rights, health &
safety and environment and accountability. However, the issue lies that they are not doing
anything about local communities or for the country being such a big company. The
organization has also been found to deliver educational facilities to all of their employees so
that they can acquire a undergraduate degree (Jennings, 2014).
Detailed analysis of the identified issues
After Steve jobs there has been a thorough attention on both the employees as well as
the company. It was found that corporate culture played a vital role in the success of apple.
However, the main features of Apple Company’s organizational culture are as follows-
 Top-notch excellence- the culture of Apple is to select the best from the best-selected
candidates. At the time of Jobs he use to dismiss employees instantly who are unable
to meet his expectations (WIRTZ & ZEITHAML, 2016). Moreover, this is continuing
under the leadership of Tim Cook because for Apple excellence is emphasized more
for their success in the market especially because of their designing and development
of products.
 Creativity- This Company mainly hires their staffs based on the knowledge, skills and
their creativity abilities. The highlight of Apple is their importance given to creativity.
The staffs that are included in the product designing and processes of development are
considered as creative (Edson & Beck, 2013). Moreover, the corporate culture of
Apple helps them to maintain their potential to develop solutions to their business and
customer needs.

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 Innovation- Among one of the most innovative organizations comes the name of
Apple. Trainings are providing to the employees to motivate in terms of their
individual work performances and giving contributions to the organization in their
processes of product developments. The heart of Apple’s business is its fastest
innovations in their corporate culture success (Jun & Sung Park, 2013).
 Secrecy- Apple is also known as an organization with their corporate culture of
secrecy. Secrecy in apple is the organization’s strategy so that they can minimize
robbery of any kind of proprietary or intellectual information. In the organization’s
policies, rules and employee contact the culture of secrecy is mentioned which the
employees needs to agree before being employed in the company (Robertson, Hannah
& Lautsch, 2015). However, this feature of Apple organization helps safeguard their
business from the other corporate surveillance and the negative effect of staff
poaching.
 Combativeness- lastly, this organization also has moderate combativeness. Steve jobs
leadership of combative approach has rooted this culture in Apple. However, under
the guidance of Tim Cook today it has been found that the organizational culture is
trying to change and in a way to become more sociable along with a little less
combative (Teece, 2014).
However, the biggest issue of Apple company is being secretive is because the corporate
culture mainly depends on the beliefs and the values which are the basis for the behavior and
it puts the attention mainly on how their business are being conducted. Consumers and buyers
can get a negative vibe or messages when the corporate culture is secretive. Moreover,
because of this the stakeholders are also suspicious about the various styles of behaviors that
are imposed by the organizational leaders. The main disadvantage of this secretive corporate
culture is the way communications are being dealt with inside the organization. On the other

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hand, the issues that are in the Apple organization is in their ethics, values and social
responsibilities. Ethics are the righteous principles or the value that mainly control the
behavior of an individual or any group. However, Apple being a huge company has high
moral values but still there are certain ethical issues that are challenging to them as well. The
ethical principle that Apple follows is that their employees should be morally correct and they
must be honest in their day-to-day business. They also make it a point where they can
eliminate those situations where employees might get into conflict of interests and their
values are that if any serious conflict occurs then only they can react but calmly. They further
want their partners, employees to maintain their confidentiality, highest standard of
conducting the business. Apple Company’s ethical and moral issues strengthened from the
time when they involved extreme diversity into their organizational culture. The violations of
the ethical rules greatly affect the reputation of the company. However, the major ethical
issues Apple face because of the heavy pressure on their computer department to find a cheap
cost provider; this company looked for international solutions and thus, gets into ethical
issues which are as follows-
 The issues violated by the suppliers and subcontractors of Apple Company in
interchanging cheaper and cost effective production.
 The privacy of their customers is observed by the company, which violated the moral
of helping their consumers (Stanwick & Stanwick, 2013).
However, though Apple has certain rules and regulations for their workforce as well as
suppliers but still ethical problems arises when they are trading in a different country. This
mainly happens because different country has different economic growth, legal systems and
culture. Moreover, it has been seen that ethics at times are ignored if the organizational
culture is not that powerful from top executives to down. Thus, if any organization has a

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organizational culture that ignore the ethical violation then that may be very much harmful
for the organization.
Recommendations
The very first recommendation would be the ways through which Apple can tactfully handle
their ethical issues. First Apple must develop a policy that should be solely based on the
organization’s philosophy, mission statement and code of conduct. Apple must include their
revised policies into their management performance programs so that they can make their
employees answerable violating any ethical rules in their job. Then they can train their
employees on workplace ethics. Role-play or experimental learning can help Apple in a huge
way to engage their employees as well as their business so that they are not engaged in any
kind of unethical situations. However, employees look at their business owners or the top
most officials for any kind of thus, they must always lead by example. Thus, Cook of Apple
must take ethics based decisions and keep a check that the same values are being maintained.
To minimize further unethical behaviors the company should take responsibility to keep a
check and balance through creating a system for the unethical behavior. Though Apple
always hires those who have high skill and knowledge for the work that they are appointed
for but along with that, they must also look for those employees whose values are ensured
with that of the company’s culture. On the other hand, the organizational culture consists of
the values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviors that the staffs in an organization share and use
daily in their work. Therefore, in the reign of Tim cook the corporate culture must be purpose
driven so that their employees as well as their business can only move forward in terms of
achieving their goals. They must also follow communication patterns that are effective so that
to become more successful Apple should have a clear, courtesy and proactive pattern of
communication pattern. Another very useful suggestion that Apple should incorporate as

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soon as possible is the culture of feedback. Feedback highly upgrades the employee’s
performance thus, a feedback oriented corporate culture where the employees can give as
well as receive the feedbacks in all aspects helps in creating an issue free corporate culture.
As stated in the model of Harrison’s Model of culture, this says that the power of
culture in corporate sectors has both advantages as well as disadvantages. However, the
moment Jobs left Apple and Tim Cook became the CEO certain issues related to corporate
culture took over that are discussed in the previous section. Thus, if the same Harrison’s
model is to be followed then the biggest disadvantage for Apple is its power culture relates to
situations where Apple can experience drawbacks and a drop in their performance if the
leader of the organization lacks the competency in leadership and business. This model
further states that in such corporate culture the employees are found to get de-motivated or
even afraid of telling their leader of any kind of losses. The decisions make by the leaders
often are criticized among the employees who are in their lower management ranks and thus,
a leader with a power culture is the biggest drawback in Apple so this organization needs a
competent culture from Cook to succeed in the future. Thus, Apple can be recommended to
become task culture from that of power culture. Task culture is regarded as the most
appropriate organizational culture for Apple because this can provide higher level of
freedom, flexibility for the workforce along with decision making in a higher speed thus,
providing space for employee’s creativity and innovations. Lastly, innovativeness and
creativity culture must be possessed at all cost in Apple because it is essential to understand
that both creativity and innovativeness has served the core business strategy of this
organization from the era of Jobs and it should be preserved for further success in the future.
Despite the future business direction that the company chooses as a fresh strategy of Apple in
their level management, any bargain in their level of innovativeness or creativity of Apple
may have negative implications and decrease the brand loyalty and so Apple must

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beforehand, take certain measures and initiatives so that they can integrate principles with the
corporate culture.
Future plan of my career
I want to become a manager in the future because I have an inborn leadership quality
in me that I want to practically apply those characteristics in a reputed organization. The
reason behind the passion of becoming a manager is mainly the responsibility and work that
they are usually do. Manager in a reputed company are often encountered with work
challenges that encourages me more to deal with them taking up the role of a manager in the
future (Block, 2016). According to those individuals who know me well, based on their and
my own analysis on myself I have concluded that to become a manager the best skills I have
are in building interpersonal relationship, communication and problem solving. Managers
need to work closely with people in his team by assigning them appropriate work and
keeping a check if that work is done in a suitable manner. Managers also need to ensure that
the employees are getting proper training and keeping the employees encouraged. However,
to all these works, a manager must be approachable, diplomatic and good at communicating
with them that I am. Communication skills mainly for the managers is to keep everybody
informed about what is happening in the organization and contacting the clients, senior
managers as well as the frontline employees (Morse, Babcock & Murthy, 2014). Lastly, the
area of problem solving which I think is also one of my strengths as a manager because for
me problems are like challenges and I get huge satisfaction from solving those problems
instantly as they arrive. Moreover, my calm and focused nature will help me more to become
an expert in this field.

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Conclusion
Thus from the above project report it can be concluded that Apple Inc. is the
technology company that started its journey since 1976 holding the hands of Steve Jobs,
Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, who are the founders of Apple. After Jobs left Apple in
2011, Tim Cook took his position and from then until now he is the new CEO of apple.
However, the current issues that are found in Apple Company are mainly related to the
corporate culture and their ethics, value and social responsibility. The issues that came out is
mainly the secrecy, combativeness and Power culture in their organizational culture and on
the other hand, the main ethical issue that has been pointed out is their excessive indulge in
their customer’s privacy. Therefore, among a number of recommendations provided the
important one that Cook should focus on immediately are that he should built a task culture
shifting from power culture without compromising with the their creativity and
innovativeness.

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References
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