But the best companies become more, not less, idiosyncratic over time. They know that to do weird, they have to be weird. This idiosyncrasy has created a culture of beauty at Apple, of hacking at Facebook, of efficiency at Amazon.
But the greatest companies aren't an idea, they’re an idea machine.
An idea machine also invests in its idea generating capacity. A great company’s deepest innovation isn't in its product but in its being: a deeply idiosyncratic approach to hiring and working, accumulated through a million tiny acts of discipline and bizarre decisions, which alienates most outsiders, but draws a few in with the special, strange intensity of a children's story, as if it had been made for them alone.