Former Apple Boss, Steve Jobs is apparently behind a scheme to train managers to think like him.

Jobs, who died last week, planned a training program in which company executives will be taught to think like him, in a forum to impart his “management DNA” to future generations.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald the key to this effort is Joel Podolny, former Yale Business School dean and it is something that Apple has been planning for years. An executive training program called Apple University was something that Jobs considered vital to the company's future: Teaching Apple executives to think like him. Notice, the aim is not to get people to think different, but rather think like Jobs.

One Apple exec told the Sydney Morning Heraland that Jobs was looking to his legacy. The idea was to take what is unique about Apple and create a forum that can impart that DNA to future generations of Apple employees. In short, immortality.

No other company has a university charged with probing so deeply into the roots of what makes the company so successful, the executive said Apple would not comment on Apple University. But people familiar with the project say Jobs personally recruited the dean of Yale's Business School in 2008 to run it. Joel Podolny's assignment is to help Apple internalise the thoughts of its visionary founder to prepare for the day when he's not around anymore.

Apparently it has created a set of educational materials so that Apple employees could learn to think and make decisions as if they were Steve Jobs. (Let's just hope Tom Cruise doesn't turn the "materials" into a new religion. sub.ed.)

More here.