You'd think by now that Gizmodo had had its fill of messing with Apple and it's legal department wouldn't you?
Well...apparently not. They recently got access to Apple's internal training manual for "Geniuses" and decided to share their impressions of what it's all about. Full article
here.
How To Be a Genius: This Is Apple’s Secret Employee Training Manual
Sam Biddle
We recently showed you just how badly some of Apple's retail elite behave when no one's watching, but surely they were taught better, right? You bet they were: Apple tells its new recruits exactly what what to think and say. How do we know? We read Apple's secret Genius Training Manual from cover to cover.
It's a penetrating look inside Apple: psychological mastery, banned words, roleplaying—you've never seen anything like it.
The Genius Training Student Workbook we received is the company's most up to date, we're told, and runs a bizarre gamut of Apple Dos and Don'ts, down to specific words you're not allowed to use, and lessons on how to identify and capitalize on human emotions. The manual could easily serve as the Humanity 101 textbook for a robot university, but at Apple, it's an exhaustive manual to understanding customers and making them happy. Sales, it turns out, take a backseat to good vibes—almost the entire volume is dedicated to empathizing, consoling, cheering up, and correcting various Genius Bar confrontations. The assumption, it'd seem, is that a happy customer is a customer who will buy things. And no matter how much the Apple Store comes off as some kind of smiling likeminded computer commune, it's still a store above all—just one that puts an enormous amount of effort behind getting inside your head.
Not surprisingly it reads like a mixture of Hubbard, Napoleon Hill, and Tony Robbins spiced with some standard "consultative selling" seminar work. Small surprise in that Apple is based in CA, that lovely State that brought so many great ideas and unique outlooks to the American experience.
Fun read. It explains a lot. I mean we all
suspected that's how they train them. But at least now we know we're not just imagining things.
