TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Apple is organized around functions, rather than divisions:

The result is a command-and-control structure where ideas are shared at the top — if not below. Jobs often contrasts Apple’s approach with its competitors’. Sony (SNE), he has said, had too many divisions to create the iPod. Apple instead has functions. “It’s not synergy that makes it work” is how one observer paraphrases Jobs’ explanation of Apple’s approach. “It’s that we’re a unified team.”
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Specialization is the norm at Apple, and as a result, Apple employees aren’t exposed to functions outside their area of expertise. Jennifer Bailey, the executive who runs Apple’s online store, for example, has no authority over the photographs on the site. Photographic images are handled companywide by Apple’s graphic arts department. Apple’s powerful retail chief, Ron Johnson, doesn’t control the inventory in his stores. Tim Cook, whose background is in supply-chain management, handles inventory across the company. (Johnson has plenty left to do, including site selection, in-store service, and store layout.)

This doesn’t just mean that the best person is handling a specific task (like the photos in Apple’s online store)—it also means that the company is interwoven and has no choice but to work together. Rather than have engineering lay out the specifications for a new product, hand it off to the design department so they can create a design that meets them, and then hand it off to marketing, Apple instead integrates design, engineering and marketing from the beginning of the process.

There’s a lot to learn from Apple’s corporate and business strategies, but I think there is even more to learn from how the company’s organized. Apple is defining how companies must be organized and managed to succeed in this century.