Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired–and Secretive–Company Really Works

If you have like me walked into an Apple store to ask a staffer in a blue (or red) T-shirt about a forthcoming product only to be told they know nothing of it then this is a book you want to read.

Adam Lashinsky Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired–and Secretive–Company Really Works is a relatively short book that gives us a behind the veil of secrecy look at the Cupertino based and secretive Apple cooperation. This book, however, does so much more and is a must-read for any self-professed Apple fan.

The book is full of fascinating snippets that probably confirm our assumptions and beliefs about the workings of Apple. For starters, it seems Apple is not necessarily a fun place to work. The product comes before anything and Steve Jobs’ influence on the company can’t be understated. According to Lashinsky a theme emerged of how differently Apple does things than the rest of the business world. Just how Jobs fashioned Apple into a rule-breaking company.

Everything was for Steve and ultimately credited to Steve. Employees had a bigger-than-life boss that drove them to achieve excellence. “But they believed that whatever they were working on would be seen, eventually, by “Steve.” Apple as a workplace is portrayed as nearly monastic in employees’ willingness to sacrifice their personal lives, remain incommunicado and achieve the extreme interdepartmental cooperation Jobs sought, even at the end. Lashinsky describes Jobs’ successor Tim Cook as “a Mr. Fix-it who blended in but didn’t take no for an answer.”

The workings of Apple can’t be adequately discussed without dealing with thesecrecy that  permeates the organization.  It shouldn’t be a huge surprise then that Lashinsky spends a great deal of time describing the elaborate level of internal secrecy the company goes to in managing and maintaining it. The reasons for all the secrecy are twofold: to maximize the free press coverage and buzz at launch and to keep demand high for existing products still on the shelves.

For example, in order to discuss a topic at a meeting, one must be sure everyone in the room is “disclosed” on the topic, meaning they have been made privy to certain secrets. So Employees are kept pretty much in the dark about what their colleagues are doing and restricted where they can go on campus.

This is unequivocal - Apple employees know something big is afoot when the carpenters appear in their office building. New walls are quickly erected. Doors are added and new security protocols put into place. Windows that once were transparent are now frosted. Other rooms have no windows at all. They are called lockdown rooms: No information goes in or out without a reason.

And it’s not just about Apple’s secrecy; Lashinsky looks at the shortcomings of the way the late Jobs kept all fellow entrepreneurs out of his inner circle of executives and what that will mean for the company’s future success. He also examines how Cook as CEO may mix things up. From being a former IBMer and his first moves elevating certain executives to establishing company-wide philanthropy and strong hints he won’t hoard cash they way Jobs did.

If I didn’t know better it’s almost as if you get the feeling when reading this book that people inside the company will be just as keen to read this as those of us on the outside.

Clinical Case Formulations

Clinical Case Formulations: Matching the Integrative Treatment Plan to the Client by Barbara Lichner Ingram. John Wiley & sons, Inc. Hoboken, New Jersey.

Getting my hands on this book has been very timely - for the last few months myself and colleagues have been attempting to reach some sort of a consensus on a working definition for Case Conceptualisation, Case Formulation; as well as how and what tools and techniques we ought to use in our practice. I personally have been influenced by the work of Sperry and do fall back on (to some extent at least) grouping patient and client information in terms of the 5P's: presentations, predispositions, precipitants, perpetuates and prognosis.

And so, I was quite keen to read this very large book (666 pages) and look for approaches and insights we might not be familiar with. The book has three main sections, broadly;

1. Case Formulation skills,

2. Twenty-Eight Core Clinical Hypotheses, and

3. Steps to Complete Case Formulation

I should say right from the start this book is suited for the reader who has completed clinical psychology studies and is pitched at professional practitioners in this field. This is not to say students would not benefit from this text - however, in parts this book is difficult, and probably more complicated than it needs to be.

Possibly the biggest criticism I have of this book is that it [Prof Barbara Ingram] seems to avoid the therapeutic techniques or modalities that have been developed and adopted over the history of psychology. Instead, it's as if she has created her own version of psychotherapy with its own schema, approaches and language. For example, the style of case summary and evaluation is unique to her and not followed elsewhere. There are 28 "core clinical hypotheses." There are 33 "standards for evaluating case formulations."

And so, I thought Part One of the book was somewhat valuable while Part Two, mostly because of a schema which is difficult to follow and different from systems we are more accustomed to was less useful.Part One - discusses a step-by-step method for developing a case plan consists of: gathering data, defining problems, specifying outcome goals, organizing and presenting the data-base, creating the plan by applying core clinical hypotheses, and writing a treatment plan and monitoring progress. I was particularly impressed by the explicit call for "monitoring progress" as, many may agree, that some see the development of a treatment plan as the end of the intervention.

Her method is similar to many conventional methods of creating a treatment plan as it defines goals and problems, provides possible explanations, interventions are focused on resolving problems, and monitors progress.

Why Does the World Exist

Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story

By Jim Holt

Liveright (July 16, 2012)

After spending weeks watching The Matrix Of Illusion which deals with the interplay between consciousness, quantum mechanics and the very fabric of the universe – coming across “Why Does the World Exist by Jim Holt at Wellington airport was sheer synchronicity.

This has been a book that I haven’t been able to put down….Holt, an elegant and witty writer seem comfortable at home in the problem’s weird inter-zone between philosophy and scientific cosmology, sets out in search of such answers.

After all, there could have been nothing. It might have been easier. Instead there is something. The universe exists, and we are here to ask about it. Why?

Early philosophers and great thinkers hadn’t asked the most fundamental question of all why anything is there at all. Why is there a world? We find no one haunted by the specter of non-being until Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who wrote in 1714, “The first question which we have a right to ask will be, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ ”

So Holt travels to Paris, London, Oxford, Pittsburgh and Austin to meet the philosophers and cosmologists David Deutsch, Adolf Grünbaum, John Leslie, Derek Parfit, Roger Penrose, Richard Swinburne and Steven Weinberg. As he moves from one to the other, Holt learns of ever more extraordinary solutions, some almost mystical, yet rooted in solid reasoning.

In doing so, this book takes on an interesting form with a meaty dense center to each chapter surrounded by the light and fluffy bread of Holt's expert writing about the settings, weather and food of his travels. While this consequently lacks the characteristics of a heady hard hitting original philosophical work, these sandwiches should prove quite palatable for most readers.

Why Does the World Exist? criss-crosses the etymological, epistemological, theological and philosophical aspects of its title while remaining a fairly easy read.

The Man Who Knew Too Much

The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer
 by David Leavitt
Weidenfeld & Nicolson pp320

For those who know even a slither of Turing will tell you of his almost childishness typical of geeky genius, who adored Disney's films, and often recited the spell that the Wicked Queen chants over the poisoned apple she offers to the simpering heroine. Why is this important?

In 1954, Turning took his own life – for he was in despair after his arrest for 'gross indecency' with a rent boy, for which his punishment had been chemical castration.

A bitten apple was found beside his bed; before chomping, he had dipped it in a cyanide solution. Novelist David Leavitt, a specialist in the existential intricacy of gay relationships, concludes this short biography by remarking that no prince ever came to kiss Turing awake.

Before looking at Leavitt’s novel, I should say I first read his "The Body of Jonah Boyd." It is a novel within a novel, ending with a self-referential twist that made me wonder whether Leavitt had been inspired by Turing's mind boggling proof about undecidability in which a computer tries to swallow its own tail – bootstrapping.

So armed with this I went on to read “The Man Who Knew Too Much”. Leavitt, the American gay novelist, has no mathematical background, though he makes considerable efforts to cover Turing's work. He doesn’t use recently released “code breaking” documents and his treatment of Turing's Enigma work is particularly thin. His focus, however, lies in applying his interpretation of sexual politics to Turing's texts against the background of the times – valuable nevertheless.

I must say though the circumstances surrounding Turing's demise are murky enough that some people doubt he really killed himself. He had been using potassium cyanide in gold-plating experiments. The poisoning was conceivably accidental. Leavitt entertains, though not so seriously, another possibility: "that the suicide was staged," and he had become, like the Hitchcock character, "a man who knew too much."

Leavitt discusses Turing's writing on artificial intelligence; his main point being that Turing asserts the equality of machines and minds as a sort of code for the demand for homosexual equality. But Turing’s wit is secondary to his scientific thesis about the computer and the brain, which comes from putting his theory of computability into the traditional problem of mind and matter: this is the argument that makes Turing's work so relevant today.

In his book Leavitt includes Turing's self-motivated pre-war work on ciphers, but doesn’t suggest that Turing took on the vital naval Enigma problem off his own bat, when prevailing wisdom considered it unsolvable. Leavitt depicts Turing's work as theoretical rather than hugely practical.

This is a fascinating story of a fascinating man told in a way that is entertaining and beautiful.