Five Lessons from Five Years at Apple

Jul 11, 2025

I recently received my 5-year milestone award signed by Tim Cook in the mail. Although I'm still a month shy of my true anniversary at Apple, receiving it prompted me to reflect on what I've learned during this transformative period. Here are five key lessons from my half decade at one of the world's most influential companies.

1. Culture Is Everything

Culture encompasses the norms and behaviors that an organization expects and tolerates. This principle applies to countries, organizations, and any community of people. I often remind my students that the root word of "culture" is "cult", a cult represents an extreme version of expected behaviors and social norms.

Apple takes culture so seriously that Steve Jobs created an internal university, Apple University, historically led by deans from prestigious institutions. The goal was to ensure deliberate effort in teaching Apple's culture, especially to new hires.

Before joining Apple, I didn't fully appreciate how organizational culture shapes everything. Culture typically begins with beliefs, values, and vision. Values define what truly matters to the organization, while norms establish the appropriate attitudes and behaviors shared among members. These beliefs and values must align between new recruits and long-term employees alike.

Effective culture requires intentional socialization practices that help people feel belonging, plus reinforcement mechanisms like standard operating procedures, policies, reward systems, and leadership attitudes that maintain behavioral norms. As the saying goes, culture is often defined by the worst behavior that's tolerated. The lowest standards of conduct set the tone for the entire environment.

All of this should drive toward meaningful purpose, strategy, and goals for everyone in the organization. Apple demonstrates daily that culture is fundamental to understanding and practicing what makes Apple, Apple.

2. Networking Creates Impactful Change

Making meaningful change in any organization requires three essential elements:

Credibility comes from consistently delivering on your core responsibilities. If you can't execute the fundamentals, no one will follow your leadership on bigger initiatives.

Bias for action is crucial because significant change requires drive to move things forward despite roadblocks, speed bumps, and resistance. Without this bias, you'll struggle to push anything across the finish line.

Resources are the third requirement. I use the acronym FHIST to categorize different resource types:

Financial - Money and budgets
Human Capital - Your skills, experience, and health
Intellectual Capital - Your knowledge and expertise
Social Capital - Your relationships, networks, trust, and influence
Time - The hours and bandwidth you have available

At Apple, social capital is king. People are typically hired for their human and intellectual capital, but you success because of who you know and how you collaborate. You cannot accomplish anything truly impactful beyond yourself without other people's help and support.

Building relationships, understanding what others do, and discovering mutual ways to help each other is both important and encouraged. I believe this social capital is much harder to build remotely, you miss crucial elements like reading body language, spontaneous conversations outside meetings, and shared meals. The network you build becomes essential for succeeding at Apple.

3. What Got You In Won't Make You Succeed

We've all encountered the new colleague who constantly leads with “Well, at my last company..." Saying this at Apple is like holding up a cross to a vampire. While we expect everyone to leverage their knowledge and experience to do their best work, you're here now for a reason, not there.

Whatever experience or expertise got you hired is just the entry point, not the success formula. Continuing to build your resources, expand your knowledge, and leverage creativity and passion is what drives success at Apple.

4. Don't Judge a Book by Its Cover

I can always spot vendors on Apple's campus because they're dressed for traditional business meetings. Meanwhile, I've seen 20-year executives wearing flip-flops, shorts, and Hawaiian shirts on a Tuesday afternoon.

At Apple, you cannot judge someone's capabilities or organizational level based on appearance or meeting behavior. Like elite special forces units, sometimes the most talented people don't look or behave exactly as you'd expect. Don’t mistake calm or casual for unqualified.

5. Constraints Drive Creativity

Apple operates in a perpetual state of being under resourced by design. We don't hire frequently, so we typically work as if we're down a person or two. This resource constraint often drives innovation and creativity in our approach to problems.

Similar to art, constraints can fuel creativity. Instead of encountering a problem and immediately thinking "just hire someone to work on that," you actually focus on solving the problem with existing resources.

This approach also prevents falling into Parkinson's Law, which states: "Work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion."

Consider digital storage as an example. When I was younger, a 1GB hard drive felt limitless. But as storage capacities increased, so did our appetite for data, photos, videos, apps filled the space simply because it was available.

Work behaves similarly. If you hire more people than necessary, bureaucracy gets imported to fill the allocated work time. Organizations start spending the majority of their time on cross-functional coordination and internal processes, like expense submission procedures, rather than focusing on what matters most: the customer and the value your company brings to the world.

These five lessons have shaped not only how I work at Apple, but how I think about organizational effectiveness and personal growth. Each insight reinforces that success comes not from what you know when you arrive, but from how you adapt, connect, and innovate within the unique culture you join.

For me, I’m five years in and I’m just getting started.

Don't get captured,