1. While still in high school, Steve Jobs met fellow computer buff Steve Wozniak who had graduated from the same high school a few years before. The first Apple computers were built in 1976 in the Cupertino, California, garage belonging to Steve Jobs’s parents. The two Steves built 50 computer boards and sold them through a local dealer. The Apple II computer was introduced two years later.
Sales began to skyrocket. When Apple went public in 1980, sales hit the billion-dollar mark. The two young entrepreneurs became instant multimillionaires.
Apple was intended to be a new type of company in which the old corporate rules were scrapped. There would be no dress codes, no formal meetings—nothing to get in the way of what really mattered: creating computers that, Apple promised, would change the world. As demand for the products increased and more employees were hired, however, seasoned managers were needed to handle the organization’s rapid growth. Soon friction developed between the two cofounders and the new management, and by 1985 neither Jobs41 nor Wozniak was associated with Apple.42 New start-up organizations often flourish under creative and charismatic leaders who have both an understanding and a passion for the technology underlying their success. However, as organizations grow, they need chief executives with a different set of skills, including the ability to delegate and to operate in a highly structured setting. If you were hired as a consultant to a fast-growing new organization and asked to provide management advice, what would you suggest?
Is it possible to keep the same type of organizational structure and culture in a larger organization as was present in a smaller one? Must organizational cultures marked by creativity and informality necessarily become more formal and structured?