After the simultaneous, and more-or-less disastrous, launch of the iPhone 3G and MobileMe in the summer of 2008 -- the launch one Gizmodo reader dubbed "iPocalypse" -- Steve Jobs summoned the MobileMe team to the Town Hall auditorium on Apple's (AAPL) Cupertino campus for an obscenity-laden dressing down. "You've tarnished Apple's reputation," he told them. "You should hate each other for having let each other down." Then he named a new executive on the spot to run the team.
That's the lead anecdote of "Inside Apple," Adam Lashinsky's feature story in the new issue of Fortune -- available to subscribers on the iPad. It's an anecdote I'd never heard before, one of dozens of juicy details that Lashinsky -- who wrote the definitive profile of Apple COO Tim Cook in 2008 -- managed to extract from the secretive company through several months of old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting. Among the other revelations:
• The sermon on the "Difference Between the Janitor and the Vice President" -- a kind of managerial parable Jobs reportedly tells every exec who reaches the VP level
• Apple's radical approach to "P&L" (the financial statement by which individual managers in other companies are held responsible for profits and losses in their divisions) that turns the concept on its head
• The effect Jobs' "Top 100" off-site meetings have on the employees who are invited and those who are left behind
• An elaborate org chart -- centered around Jobs -- that includes dozens of VPs whose names you'll never get from Apple PR
• The mission-critical task assigned to the "band of eggheads" that Jobs hired just before his second medical leave
You can read Lashinsky's story -- and the rest of the May 23 Fortune 500 issue -- on the iPad for free if you are a Fortune subscriber. You can get the Fortune iPad app on iTunes here. If you're not a print subscriber, click here. You can conduct the entire transaction online.
