Malibu Police Chief: “You don’t draw shit, Lebowski. Now we got a nice, quiet little beach community here, and I aim to keep it nice and quiet. So let me make something plain. I don’t like you sucking around, bothering our citizens, Lebowski. I don’t like your jerk-off name. I don’t like your jerk-off face. I don’t like your jerk-off behavior, and I don’t like you, jerk-off. Do I make myself clear?”

The Dude: [after a pause]
“I’m sorry, I wasn’t listening.”
The Big Lebowski, 1998

In Silicon Valley, bleeding edge technological capacity and business rivalry are deeply entrenched with a common goal: success.

Despite this, Apple has nurtured a mode, a way of its own, which speaks of something else. This something else would not negate the technology acumen or the managerial poise that dominates there and in many places of the post-modern world – and, should we say, by far.

This “something else” is Apple’s way of thinking and striving, and it often departs from traditional thinking, the thinking that is still taught at many business schools. This book has gradually elicited a number of threads that seem to form the DNA of that company. We have weaved them and shown that they amount to reinvent the two notions of competitiveness and “innovativeness” in surprising ways.

A good friend of ours, a brilliant engineer who became a human factors specialist (ergonomist) by vocation, one day confessed that it was somewhat paradoxical for him to remind students that (apart from rare exceptions) humans have two knees, a characteristic that seems frequently forgotten by the people designing workplaces for people in seated position.

A manager should remind his employees that, in any consumer goods products market, the fundamental objective is to design the best possible products, the most beautiful and easiest to use, and to make sure, through permanent customer satisfaction monitoring, that these objectives are reached, keeping in mind that “[the rest] will be given to you as well” (Matthew 6:33)¹.

A reader who has only read the genes chapter, and who would have never heard of Apple, may well ask himself why such obvious considerations deserve a book.

As humans, we are easily distracted by pursuing too many objectives, which is the most certain way to forget the essential.

We currently live in a troubled period, where the news flow, even in countries considered as developed, is made up of a hopeless list of hate, injustice and violence in all forms. The quest for beauty, common to Leonardo Da Vinci and Steve Jobs, may appear in this respect as a futile concern of rich men. We believe this is not the case. Any human being looks for, needs and deserves some kind of beauty, down to every aspect of his life, not necessarily the technological ones, but also including food presentation, clothing, etc.

Jobs has installed what resembles a DNA ladder for reaching new heights, where before him there was none. The ladder is shaped as a helix, a double helix. In fact, when embracing life in a multidimensional way, each lives a nonlinear path. We believe Job’s major legacy has been to equip Apple with a self-programmable tomorrow. An engine propelling it into the 21st Century. Apple thus stands beyond linearity. A non-surprising offspring would, for instance, be a “programmable computer", using human thought, for instance, and varying the functions set.

We would like to think that the comparisons we’ve made between Leonardo Da Vinci and Steve Jobs as individuals also extends to their respective periods of time, Steve Jobs announcing a new Renaissance of modern times to come, just like Leonardo Da Vinci did for the one we know from history, ending the dark medieval times. Apple instead builds holograms: the whole is available from any angle. All in all it is a difference in thinking.

The Apple Way, in short, is nothing more than concentrating on the essential, and forgetting about the rest, which will come anyway in due time, as a necessary fill up of what was correctly seeded once.

The question is now “who can grow and guard Apple’s DNA?". And this is more important than the price of gas … because it perpetually seeds new orders. A coherent 1% of new genes are more powerful than the 99% past ones.

Altogether, the plain and simple content of this book has been proven to be worth about one trillion dollars. Wouldn’t you like to gain even a small portion of this?

“There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.”

John Lennon