One of the strangest research trips I ever went on was to the Kannon Do Zen Center in Mountain View, California. It came at the end of a long day at Apple trying to understand what made the company tick. My office at the time was a stationery closet on the fourth floor of One Infinite Loop, Apple’s corporate headquarters, a makeshift space an iPhone’s throw from the senior executives including Steve Jobs.

It was late 2009 and I had been hired for a few months to do some writing for the then nascent Apple University, an internal programme intended to help rising executives within the company learn the business of Apple. But first I had to try to learn it myself, to find something to grip in a company that to the outside world seems as smooth as the glass facades of its shops.