January 28, 1990

TODAY AT Apple Computer, just like in most corporations facing slow sales and other problems, employees outside the executive suites are toting up their debts, checking their savings account balances and waiting with bated breath to see if they’ll be among the 500 to 1,000 people who will likely be laid off as a result of Apple’s recent lowered earnings and gloomy forecasts.

Apple’s annual shareholders’ meeting is coming up this week, and there’s a section called “Certain Transactions” in the “Notice to Shareholders” booklet that should make employees’ blood boil. Judging by what’s in the booklet, it’s pretty likely that Apple execs don’t have the same worries as the worker bees.

In addition to describing the huge loans Apple makes (and forgives) to its executive staff, mostly for the purchase of “personal residences,” the section “Certain Transactions” provides details of Apple’s “golden parachutes,” whereby if an executive gets fired or laid off, he (and I do mean “he”) gets lots and lots of money.

The following figures are maximum amounts based on salary, bonuses and length of service:

* William Coldrick, senior VP of sales for Apple USA, gets $2.1 million in exchange for a pink slip.
* Del Yocam, former president of Apple Pacific and longtime executive staffer, would have gotten $1.6 million if he hadn’t left “”voluntarily.”
* Donald Casey, vice president of networking and communications for Apple Products has a $1.2 million pillow to land on.
* Ian Diery, president of Apple Pacific, gets $600,000.
* Gerald Forsyth, VP of worldwide manufacturing for Apple Products, gets $400,000 and a one-time bonus of $150,000.

I saved the best for last.

Not long ago, Apple re-hired Joseph Graziano for his old position (during Jobs’ reign) as chief financial officer, to fill the position that Debi Coleman vacated. Graziano, likely remembering how quickly the winds of favor shifted last time, negotiated a whopper of a golden parachute: $1.5 million, plus hundreds of thousands of shares of stock, plus his present salary and bonuses (some $600,000 a year) for four years, “subject to upward adjustment” if the bonuses go higher than expected.

Though typical of large U.S. corporations, Apple’s management practices are a deep disappointment to many who follow the company, especially after all those years of award-winning advertising about “power to the individual.” Last week I asked an Apple follower, “So what did you expect?” He said, “Apple was supposed to be different.”

I’m reading a book right now that I think every executive and director at Apple and in Silicon Valley ought to take a lesson from if they really want their firms to succeed. It’s called, “In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power,” by a Harvard social scientist named Shoshana Zuboff.

Zuboff believes that a fundamental change must take place inside the corporation to transit from an industrial economy to one based on computer technology.

Companies like Apple that sell information technology, designed to hurry along this process of changing the character of work, should be at the forefront of this transition. They should be merrily breaking down of the kind of authoritarian, do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do management structures that keep employees as serfs in the fiefdom and keep executives cushioned with pillows of cash from the consequences of their decisions.

This, in fact, is the great challenge for technology companies like Apple at the dawn of the information age. In the chapter “Dilemmas of Transformation in the Age of the Smart Machine,” Zuboff throws down the gauntlet:

“”The questions that we face today are finally about leadership,” says Zuboff. “Will there be leaders who are able to recognize the historical moment and the choices it presents? .Ž.Ž. Will they find ways to create the organizational conditions in which new visions, new concepts, and a new language of workplace relations can emerge?

“.Ž.Ž. By .Ž.Ž. ignoring the need for a new vision of work and organization, we will have forfeited the dramatic business benefits (computer technology) can provide. Instead we will find ways to absorb the dysfunctions, putting out brush fires and patching wounds in slow-burning bewilderment.”

I hope the questions we face today are some of the same questions that are asked Wednesday at Apple’s shareholders’ meeting. I’ll be waiting to hear the answers.