Apple, a tech giant, has a unique organizational design and leadership model that has significantly contributed to its innovation success. Initially, the company had a conventional structure, divided into business units with their own P&L responsibilities. However, Steve Jobs, upon his return as CEO, restructured the company into a functional organization, combining the different departments into one. This change has been remarkable, as Apple remains a functional organization today, despite its size and complexity. The company operates with no conventional general managers, allowing for more efficient decision-making and better alignment of accountability. This shift from a functional to a multidivisional structure has proven beneficial for companies facing technological change and industry upheaval. Apple's commitment to a functional organization has not remained static, as the importance of artificial intelligence and other new areas has increased. This unique organizational model offers both innovation benefits and leadership challenges, providing valuable insights for individuals and companies seeking to succeed in rapidly changing environments.

Apple's primary goal is to create products that enrich people's daily lives, including developing new categories like the iPhone and Apple Watch and continually innovating within those categories. The iPhone camera, for example, has contributed to the photography industry with numerous innovations. Apple relies on a structure that centers on functional expertise, allowing those with the most expertise and experience to have decision rights for that domain. This is because Apple competes in markets with high rates of technological change and disruption, and relies on the judgment and intuition of people with deep knowledge of the technologies responsible for disruption. Apple's commitment to offering the best possible products is undercut if short-term profit and cost targets are the overriding criteria for judging investments and leaders. In a functional organization, individual and team reputations act as a control mechanism in placing bets, ensuring the balance between attention to costs and the value added to the user experience.

Apple's organizational structure is based on Steve Jobs' concept of "structure follows strategy," which aligns expertise with decision rights. Since then, Apple's managers have been expected to possess three key leadership characteristics: deep expertise, immersion in the details of their functions, and a willingness to collaboratively debate other functions during collective decision-making.

Deep expertise is a key characteristic of Apple, as it allows managers to meaningfully engage in all work within their individual functions. This approach cascades down all levels of the organization through areas of ever-increasing specialization. Apple's leaders believe that world-class talent wants to work for and with other world-class talent in a specialty.

Immersion in the details is another key principle of Apple, as it is essential for speedy and effective cross-functional decision-making at the highest levels. Apple's senior leaders pay extreme attention to the exact shape of products' rounded corners, resulting in a shape known in the design community as a "squircle." This deep immersion in detail is not just a concern that is pushed down to lower-level people; it is central at the leadership level.

Having leaders who are experts in their areas and can go deep into the details has profound implications for how Apple is run. Leaders can push, probe, and "smell" an issue, knowing which details are important and where to focus their attention. Many people at Apple see it as liberating and exhilarating to work for experts, who provide better guidance and mentoring than a general manager would. Together, all can strive to do the best work of their lives in their chosen area.

Apple's development and shipping of products require cross-functional collaboration, as no function is responsible for a product or service on its own. This collaborative debate is crucial, as no function is responsible for a product or a service on its own. When debates reach an impasse, higher-level managers weigh in as tiebreakers, including the CEO and senior VPs. To achieve this at speed with sufficient attention to detail, Apple fills many senior positions from within the ranks of its VPs, who have experience in Apple's way of operating.

For people to attain and remain in a leadership position within a function, they must be highly effective collaborators. Leaders are expected to hold strong, well-grounded views and advocate forcefully for them, yet also be willing to change their minds when presented with evidence that others' views are better. A leader's ability to be both partisan and open-minded is facilitated by deep understanding of and devotion to the company's values and common purpose, and a commitment to separating how right from how hard a particular path is so that the difficulty of executing a decision doesn't prevent its being selected.

The development of the iPhone's portrait mode illustrates a fanatical attention to detail at the leadership level, intense collaborative debate among teams, and the power of a shared purpose to shape and ultimately resolve debates.

Apple's collaborative debate involves people from various functions who disagree, push back, promote or reject ideas, and build on one another's to come up with the best solutions. This requires open-mindedness from senior leaders and inspires, prod, or influence colleagues in other areas to contribute toward achieving their goals. Apple's approach to leadership has led to tremendous innovation and success over the past two decades, but it has also faced challenges, especially with revenues and head count having exploded since 2008. As the company has grown, entering new markets and moving into new technologies, its functional structure and leadership model have had to evolve.

Apple has been disciplined about limiting the number of senior positions to minimize how many leaders must be involved in any cross-functional activity. In response, many Apple managers have been evolving the leadership approach described above: experts leading experts, immersion in the details, and collaborative debate. The discretionary leadership model, which is codified into a new educational program for Apple's VPs and directors, aims to address the challenge of getting this leadership approach to drive innovation in all areas of the company, not just product development, at an ever-greater scale.

Apple's VP of applications, Roger Rosner, has had to contend with three challenges arising from Apple's tremendous growth. First, the size of his function has exploded in terms of both head count (from 150 to about 1,000) and the number of projects under way at any given time. Second, the scope of his portfolio has widened, and as Apple's product portfolio and number of projects have expanded, even more coordination with other functions is required, increasing the complexity of collaborating across the many units.

Apple's VP, Roger Rosner, has adapted his role to focus on teaching and delegating tasks to team members. He has moved some tasks from his owning box, such as productivity apps, into his teaching box, guiding and providing feedback to help develop software applications according to Apple's norms. Rosner has also added activities beyond his original expertise, such as publishing news content via an app. As long as a task remains in the learning box, leaders must adopt a beginner's mindset, questioning subordinates in a way that suggests they don't already know the answer.

Rosner has delegated some tasks, such as iMovie and GarageBand, to people with the requisite capabilities. He spends about 40% of his time on activities he owns, 30% on learning, 15% on teaching, and 15% on delegating. This discretionary leadership model preserves the fundamental principle of an effective functional organization at scale, aligning expertise and decision rights. Apple's functional organization is rare among large companies, but it flies in the face of prevailing management theory that companies should be reorganized into divisions and business units.

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