Adam Lashinsky

Apple is so secretive internally, they keep secrets from each other.

The summer before my senior year in college, I talked my way into an unpaid internship on Capitol Hill. I was able to have this stimulating resume- and network- enhancing experience because my parents could afford to keep me clothed, housed, and fed in the nation's capital for 10 weeks.

What makes Samsung so mysterious is that it's not altogether clear who leads the company or what its leaders do. The company follows an avowedly Confucian model of consensus-driven decision-making, values bone-crushingly hard work, and shows tremendous deference to the founding Lee family, despite its lack of a controlling interest in its shares.

ICG became a dot-com joke, a one-stock example of extreme hubris on the part of its management and the investment bankers and sell-side analysts who embarrassed themselves by pumping it up.

Tesla has humiliated established carmakers with its brilliant vision. But Detroit, Turin, Stuttgart, and so on have understood scale as well as capital allocation for decades. Such gargantuan tasks could yet humiliate Tesla.

What to do with a leading business that's challenged by a new technology wave without hurting an existing profit stream? The single greatest example of recent memory is Apple's willingness to decimate iPod sales by incorporating all the category-defining product's features into a new gizmo, the iPhone.

Roku collects money two ways: by selling hardware, which it calls 'players'; and by selling advertising and taking a cut of revenues from the video publishers on its platform.

Salesforce employees are so immersed in the fervor over their offerings and their unique workplace that they are nearly incredulous to learn that few people beyond the legions of customers using Salesforce's product have the faintest idea what the company does.

Innovation, like creativity, is an amorphous concept. It's the holy grail of business, but achieving it - even merely explaining it - is lightning-in-a-bottle difficult.

Before its immature ways caught up with it, Uber got bigger and went further than Webvan ever did. But it bleeds money, courts controversy, and makes enemies like no company Ive ever seen.

Newfangled online sites like 'Business Insider' and 'Huffington Post' built businesses they later sold for hundreds of millions of dollars by ripping off the work of more talented journalists and then playing Google's digitally native games better than the old fogeys ever could.

Salesforce acquires companies - it has snapped up 55 since 2006 - that are either more innovative or that have pioneered market segments that Salesforce hasn't yet cracked.