Former CEO of Mozilla and former Apple employee, John Lilly, has shed a little light on one of Apple's major strengths under Steve Jobs: how to keep prevent pre-launch leaks.
Lilly remembers the time Jobs returned to Apple as interim CEO - a time when secrets leaking from the company was commonplace:
One of the struggles we were going through when he came back was that Apple was about the leakiest organization in history — it had gotten so bad that people were cavalier about it. In the face of all those leaks, I remember the first all company e-mail that Steve sent around after becoming Interim CEO again — he talked in it about how Apple would release a few things in the coming week, and a desire to tighten up communications so that employees would know more about what was going on — and how that required more respect for confidentiality. That mail was sent on a Thursday; I remember all of us getting to work on Monday morning and reading mail from Fred Anderson, our then-CFO, who said basically: “Steve sent mail last week, he told you not to leak, we were tracking everyone’s mail, and 4 people sent the details to outsiders. They’ve all been terminated and are no longer with the company.”And it worked. Leaks stopped and that's still the case today.
Lilly's recollections of working with Steve Jobs are in a post on his Tumblr site.
(Via: CultofMac)
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