User:Capitalismojo/AppleU

Apple University is a training facility of Apple Computer, located in Cupertino, California. This corporate university was designed to instruct personnel employed by Apple in the various aspects of Apple's technology and corporate culture.

History
Steven P. Jobs established Apple University in 2008 as a way to inculcate employees into Apple’s business culture and educate them about its history, particularly as the company grew. The program was devised by Joel Podolny, then the dean of Yale School of Management. Mr. Jobs selected him when the program was founded, and he remains head of the program and effectively serves as dean of the university. He is a vice president at Apple.

Courses are not required, only recommended. Employees sign up for courses tailored to their positions and backgrounds on an internal website available only to Apple staff members.

It is highly secretive and rarely written about. Employees are strongly discouraged from talking about the company in general, including Apple University. No pictures of the classrooms have surfaced publicly.

Apple runs its training year round and in-house. The full-time faculty design and teach the courses. Faculty members include professors from universities like Yale; Harvard; the University of California-Berkeley; Stanford; and M.I.T. Some of the faculty continue to hold positions at their universities while also working for Apple.

Apple has strenously pursued the vision that function and beauty come from simplicity, and teachers in its internal training program sometimes point to a collection of Picasso lithographs that illustrate the drive to boil down ideas to their most essential components.

Courses
Some of the courses teach case studies about important business decisions that Apple made, one of the employees said, including the one to make the iPod and its iTunes software compatible with Microsoft’s Windows system. This was a topic of fierce debate among executives. Mr. Jobs hated the idea of sharing the iPod with Windows, but he eventually acquiesced to his lieutenants. It turned out that opening the iPod to Windows users led to explosive growth of the music player and the iTunes Store, an ecosystem that would later contribute to the success of the iPhone.

 “Communicating at Apple.”  This course focuses on clear communication for making products intuitive, sharing ideas within Apple, and marketing products.

“What Makes Apple, Apple,” Focuses on one of Mr. Jobs’s goals: to make complex computer technologies feel understandable and natural. In the course an instructor showed a slide of the remote control for the Google TV. The remote had 78 buttons. Then the insrtuctor, Mr. Nelson, showed a photo of the Apple TV remote, a thin rod with three buttons.

Campus
The classes are taught on Apple’s corporate campus in Cupertino, California. Apple University is in a section of buildings called City Center. The rooms are well designed and built in a trapezoid shape. Occasionally, classes are offered in Apple’s offices overseas, and the professors travel there to teach.

In 2104 Apple planned an expansion of Apple University to China, to include a Dean to run Apple University China.

Academic Staff and Instructors

 * Tim Cook, CEO.
 * Joel Podolny, formerly the dean of Yale School of Management
 * Richard Tedlow, a Harvard University business historian.
 * Randy Nelson who came from the animation studio Pixar
 * Joshua Cohen, a Stanford professor
 * Morten Hansen, of Berkley