And now observers, academics, and even some other companies are taking notes. Because while Apple's tactics may seem like Industrial Revolution relics, they've helped the company position itself ahead of its competitors and at the forefront of the tech industry. Sometimes, evil works.

Over the past 100 years, management theory has followed a smooth trajectory, from enslavement to empowerment. The 20th century began with Taylorism — engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor's notion that workers are interchangeable cogs — but with every decade came a new philosophy, each advocating that more power be passed down the chain of command to division managers, group leaders, and workers themselves. In 1977, Robert Greenleaf's Servant Leadership argued that CEOs should think of themselves as slaves to their workers and focus on keeping them happy.

Silicon Valley has always been at the forefront of this kind of egalitarianism. In the 1940s, Bill Hewlett and David Packard pioneered what business author Tom Peters dubbed "managing by walking around," an approach that encouraged executives to communicate informally with their employees. In the 1990s, Intel's executives expressed solidarity with the engineers by renouncing their swanky corner offices in favor of standard-issue cubicles. And today, if Google hasn't made itself a Greenleaf-esque slave to its employees, it's at least a cruise director: The Mountain View campus is famous for its perks, including in-house masseuses, roller-hockey games, and a cafeteria where employees gobble gourmet vittles for free. What's more, Google's engineers have unprecedented autonomy; they choose which projects they work on and whom they work with. And they are encouraged to allot 20 percent of their work week to pursuing their own software ideas. The result? Products like Gmail and Google News, which began as personal endeavors.

Jobs, by contrast, is a notorious micromanager. No product escapes Cupertino without meeting Jobs' exacting standards, which are said to cover such esoteric details as the number of screws on the bottom of a laptop and the curve of a monitor's corners. "He would scrutinize everything, down to the pixel level," says Cordell Ratzlaff, a former manager charged with creating the OS X interface.

At most companies, the red-faced, tyrannical boss is an outdated archetype, a caricature from the life of Dagwood. Not at Apple. Whereas the rest of the tech industry may motivate employees with carrots, Jobs is known as an inveterate stick man. Even the most favored employee could find themselves on the receiving end of a tirade. Insiders have a term for it: the "hero-shithead roller coaster." Says Edward Eigerman, a former Apple engineer, "More than anywhere else I've worked before or since, there's a lot of concern about being fired."

But Jobs' employees remain devoted. That's because his autocracy is balanced by his famous charisma — he can make the task of designing a power supply feel like a mission from God. Andy Hertzfeld, lead designer of the original Macintosh OS, says Jobs imbued him and his coworkers with "messianic zeal." And because Jobs' approval is so hard to win, Apple staffers labor tirelessly to please him. "He has the ability to pull the best out of people," says Ratzlaff, who worked closely with Jobs on OS X for 18 months. "I learned a tremendous amount from him."