One of the strangest research trips I ever went on was to the Kannon Do Zen Center in Mountain View, California. It came at the end of a long day at Apple trying to understand what made the company tick. My office at the time was a stationery closet on the fourth floor of One Infinite Loop, Apple’s corporate headquarters, a makeshift space an iPhone’s throw from the senior executives including Steve Jobs.
It was late 2009 and I had been hired for a few months to do some writing for the then nascent Apple University, an internal programme intended to help rising executives within the company learn the business of Apple. But first I had to try to learn it myself, to find something to grip in a company that to the outside world seems as smooth as the glass facades of its shops.
Trying to get the truth out of any successful organisation is a challenge. Failure is a far better teacher than success, and since the early 2000s, Apple had been on a tear. Almost every major product launch had gone well, its retail strategy had been a triumph and its share price was soaring. The embarrassments beetled in the shadows, the botched MobileMe service, the lengthy investigation into the backdating of stock options for senior executives, the fact that the iPhone, for many of its urban users at least, was a terrible phone.