Apple's magic tricks and business spells revealed

Apple's magic tricks and business spells revealed: "

Apple remains one of the most divisive subjects in the IT world. Technologists tend to love Apple or loathe it (see the recent Case against Apple - In five parts from Jason Calacanis).

But, even Apple’s most bitter critics grudgingly acknowledge that CEO Steve Jobs has led a dramatic turnaround and that the company is riding a hot streak of winning products from the iMac to the iPod to the iTunes store to the MacBook to the iPhone.

TechRepublic’s sister site BNET has pulled back the veil and produced a new series on how Apple does business and what your company can learn from it.

Here’s how BNET describes its study:

Apple has plenty of mystique, but what looks like magic is something a lot more calculated. What works for Apple can be distilled into principles of sound management that could (in the right culture) flourish elsewhere too… We’ve pored through Apple’s storied history, took the measure of its successes and its failures, and with the help of experts who’ve followed the company for years, parsed the Apple mystique into a handful of how-tos and few reliable principles that you can use in leading your own team.

The series is broken into four parts plus a poll at the end:

1. How to innovate like Apple


2. Four principles of Apple’s successes (and failures)


3. Insanely great marketing


4. The Apples of other industries


5. Vote: What is Apple’s Achilles’ heel?

So you can go over to BNET to read The Science Behind Apple’s Magic. It’s definitely worth a look. Each of the pieces is also available as a downloadable PDF. If nothing else, take a look at the four principles piece, which is the heart of the series, in my opinion.

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(Via Tech Sanity Check.)