Apple University Will Teach Executives to Be Like Steve Jobs

Apple and Steve Jobs have creating a training program called Apple University in which company executives will be taught to think like him, reports the LA Times.

"Steve was looking to his legacy. The idea was to take what is unique about Apple and create a forum that can impart that DNA to future generations of Apple employees," said a former Apple executive who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve his relationship with the company. "No other company has a university charged with probing so deeply into the roots of what makes the company so successful."

According to the site, In 2008 Steve Jobs personally recruited Joel Podolny the dean of Yale's Business School to run the program.


"One of the things that Steve Jobs understood very well is that Apple is like no other company on the planet," said longtime Apple analyst Tim Bajarin. "It became pretty clear that Apple needed a set of educational materials so that Apple employees could learn to think and make decisions as if they were Steve Jobs."

Jobs reportedly identified tenets that he believed would unleash innovation and sustain success. Things like accountability, attention to detail, perfectionism, simplicity, secrecy.

Podolny is said to have fallen under the spell of Jobs leaving Yale for a chance to work with the visionary. "While there are many great companies, I cannot think of one that has had as tremendous personal meaning for me as Apple," he wrote in a farewell note to Yale students. His position was clearly important to Steve Jobs as he was moved into an office between Jobs and Cook. Later he was named vice president of human resources.

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