[marcinzm]

>Anything that Apple manages to ship (in my experience) is in spite of their corporate culture, not because of it.

You can say this about probably every large company out there and yet in the end they deliver. The saying "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" applies to corporate cultures as well imho. Once the target becomes to optimize against the culture then the culture ceases to be a good culture.

In some ways I can see secrecy diluting the usual backstabbing politics of larger corporations since different groups lack as much information with which to wage such politics against each other.