Every supplier knows that if it can’t meet its commitments to deliver a defined number of units, it faces a legal fight with Apple or risks not being chosen for the next product. So when push came to shove, suppliers knew what to prioritize. “They were always willing to do the right thing until it wasn’t economically feasible to continue to do the right thing,” says an Apple engineer who managed product launches. “If you make an organization choose, they will choose profits.”
Another Apple executive referred to the statistic that iPhone account for less than a fifth of global smartphone shipments but garners 80 percent of industry profits. “To do that, you need to be creating competition at every level in the supply chain. You need to be ruthless,” this person says. “But you can’t do that and also be compliant.” A manufacturing design engineer at Apple recalled a day when Cook sent a note about the importance of corporate social responsibility. Such notes were meant to convey something important: We care about this at the highest level of Apple. But that same day his more direct bosses were demanding improvements to output. “The two messages were opposed to each other,” he says. But there was no genuine recognition of that. Apple as an organization was a living, breathing manifestation of cognitive dissonance.
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