Organizational Culture: Apple Corporation

Introduction

The Apple Corporation has grown from a garage workbench producing one personal computer at a time to a multibillion-dollar manufacturer that designs and markets globally one of the best mobile communication and media devices. Known Apple’s products include Macs, iPods and iPads among others. In addition, Apple is a pioneer in the digital music industry with iTunes online store and iPod. Corporation’s success partially depends on the company’s mission statement. As it stipulates, Apples key focus is to design Macs, OSX, iLife, iWork and professional software in the best way possible. As a result, Apples affirms that Apple has re-engineered the mobile phone through the iPhone and App store and is dictating the future of mobile media and computing devices with iPad.

Apple’s organizational culture grounds on teamwork and focus. Through this policy, the company encourages all the employees to work on one idea at once. This ensures that every employee works towards the organization’s main objectives and enables Apple to have a small number of brands that are very powerful and reliable in the market. Team spirit, innovation, and focus contribute to the effectiveness of Apple’s overall strategy. To deepen the concept of innovation, Apple, for instance, initiates a bottom-up process whereby unique and creative solutions can flow from low-level employees to senior management. To maintain high status, however, the company will have to remain true to the founder’s philosophy of working in team and paying attention to detail. With Tim Cock’s philosophy, Apple’s strong profile and impressive organizational culture will surely survive and thrive for a very long time.

Suggestions for How to Maintain Effectiveness at Apple Corporation

According to evaluation of our team, the effectiveness lies in doing things correctly and for the benefit of the organization as a whole. From this perspective, Apple Corporation is undoubtedly effective in a number of ways. As Lashinsky (2014) affirms, Apple’s culture emphasizes on convergence in terms of focus of the entire team. All employees often have to ensure that whatever they are doing is in line with what everyone else in the company is working on. This implies handling the company’s projects as one team, and, therefore, giving their business processes all support and effort possible. For Apple to maintain organization’s effectiveness at this level, company should take a number of measures.

First, Apple Corporation regards innovation as one of its core strategies in the global market. The company may not have too many product lines, but Apples current products are popular enough to beat competitors such as Samsung that has over twenty different gadgets to sell. Therefore, it is critical for the Apple to maintain the business processes within the organization that foster calculative innovation. All Apple products, including iPods that the iPhones and iPads should have replaced, rate highly in the market. This means that the company has the capacity to withstand external pressure from competitors, as its product is still unrivaled. More recently, there were questions about the relevance of the Apple Watch to the avid Apple customer. These latest gadgets are slowly gaining acceptance in the market and just like other Apple devices, will be popular among consumers soon. Apple has managed to attract and maintain a faithful following due to the company’s attention to detail. Apple must resist any temptation to sacrifice its attention-to-detail strategy, despite the desire for expanding its product portfolio. Instead, the company should continue keeping the employees focused on one project at a time.

Another suggestion to keep this company effective is applying employee engagement practices while implementing the company’s management strategy. Lashinsky (2014) emphasizes that previously workers were motivated to stay because the company was hitting the trillion dollar mark in terms of its worth. With the success of other companies, such as Asus, Apple must design an employee retention strategy to ensure that the company’s best brains remain intact. The best way to achieve this is to make employees emotionally invested in the company. In such a way, employees will be able to work towards the organizational goals and objectives with or without supervision (Williams, 2015).

Explanation of Whether Apple Corporation Will Survive

Our evaluation reveals that Apple will survive the rough competition in IT industry in a foreseeable future. Last one year, Apple initiated key projects aimed at cementing the corporation’s platform in manufacturing and selling media gadgets. Through this initiative, Apple acquired Metaio, Mapsense among other companies. These acquisitions mean that the corporation does not emphasize creating more products only, but also introducing powerful applications that might serve to customers in a unique way. This growth strategy, coupled with Apple’s focus and teamwork philosophy, will bolster the company’s market presence and strengthen technological innovation in numerous ways. Moreover, by consistently creating new applications and software that customers can use within various contexts, Apple Corporation manages to foster a long-term business relationship with its customers. With periodic upgrades and new releases, Apple is able to keep their customers interested in what the company is working on, and, in most cases, confidentiality of such information turns to the company’s advantage.

Based on Williams (2015) analysis, Apple is smaller than most international business organizations since it has only about 80,000 employees worldwide. This means that the company can continue to encourage all their employees to work on specific projects until they reach to perfection. Such kind of precision that will continue to appeal to their customers even in the constantly changing face of technology. Besides, every product approved for release within Apple is a result of much hard work and long hours at the innovation table. The company does not allow its employees to play around with too many ideas at a time. Instead of limiting the company’s creativeness, such approach streamlines the business processes and ensures that Apple only is associated with the best. For a business with as large market share as Apple has, this is a remarkably sustainable strength.

Conclusion

Apple is an organization built on the basis of innovation and precision to the point of perfection. The company produces some of the most personalized phones and computer systems in the world. With products like the iPhones, iPads, and Macs, the company has been able to capture a large market consisting mostly of people who appreciate the exclusivity, consistency and accuracy of Apple novelties. The company’s mission statement may have changed, but the company remains true to its original spirit in its drive for perfection. The company’s organizational culture needs to proceed with encouraging intensive concentration on the separate projects in order to ensure that by the time they unveil a new product, it is ready to represent the Apple brand. The high performance here is a result of the company’s ability to bring all of their best minds aboard a given product rather than trying to multitask and produce a wide range of substandard innovations. This has enabled Apple to remain effective despite its inclination and emphasis on innovation as part of the business processes. To maintain their current philosophy, the corporation should initiate adapting employee engagement as a lucrative practice to retain its best brains in the face of growing competition from other tech giants. This will ensure that the company continues to impress and serve to their customers and shareholders for a very long time.

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