Welcome to Apple

The note Instagrammed above and quoted below greets new Apple employees on their first day of work. That's not a new revelation, but seeing it turn up again online is a great reminder. Apple sweats a lot of little details. From day one.

There is work and there is your life's work.

The kind of work that has your fingerprints all over it. The kind of work that you never compromise on. Thought you'd sacrifice a weekend for. You can do that kind of work at Apple. People don't come here to play it safe. They come here to swim in the deep end.

They want their work to add up to something.

Something big. Something that couldn't happen anywhere else.

 Welcome to Apple.

That sense -- that Apple is working on things that are insanely great, that will dent universes -- was deliberately made part of Apple's corporate culture during the Steve Jobs era, and is something the current executive team no doubt wants to maintain.

Ultimately, whether you find it inspirational or cultish, it's proven effective, over and over again, every time Apple ships a new device or announces record results.

Often in modern companies employees aren't instilled with a sense of value. Their individual contributions are recognized and they aren't made to feel as if they matter. Sometimes they're deliberately made to feel like they don't matter, like they're an insignificant cog in a giant wheel, expendable and always replaceable. That products are part of an assembly line, a unending conveyer belt of beige boxes. A machine.

There's no shortage of stories about Steve Jobs and Apple utterly annihilating employees, or about the stresses and pressures endured by those who work at Apple.

But on the first day, when employees are new and expectations are set, they're told they can change the world at Apple. And that's a tremendously powerful message.

Source: M via @nickbilton,

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