Last month, Apple announced something that has rarely been achieved in business history. It announced, on a year-on-year basis, an increase in revenue of 82% and an increase in profits of 125%. If you leave aside tiny startups that start from a very low base, few startups grow this fast?those that do are called gazelles in the entrepreneurship field and are about as rare as real life gazelles. It is simply unheard of for a large company, a Fortune 500 company at that, to grow this fast. One may have to go back to history books to check if this has ever happened before.

But this is not all. Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson and LG all managed to lose money in the last quarter on their cellphones. Samsung, RIM (the maker of the Blackberry) and HTC managed to make money but Apple made several times more money than all three of them combined. Apple?s cash flow from operations for the past quarter was $11.1 billion on revenues of $25 billion with a staggering 40% plus gross profit margin. According to an analysis by Horace Dediu of the consulting firm Asymco, fully two-thirds of the profits of the global mobile phone industry accrued to Apple in the past quarter.

Apple today is the most valuable technology company on the planet, ahead of Microsoft, IBM, Cisco and Amazon. Last week, briefly, it became the most valuable company in the world by market capitalisation when it outflanked Exxon Mobil. This is beyond remarkable. It is a jaw-dropping performance.

Not too long ago, in 1997, just as Apple was emerging from its near-death experience under a bunch of mediocre CEOs, Michael Dell had given up Apple for dead and suggested that it be shut down. Apple not only bounced back, but in January 2006 surpassed the market capitalisation of Dell?an event memorialised by the famous internal Apple memo which read: Team, it turned out that Michael Dell wasn?t perfect at predicting the future. Based on today?s stock market close, Apple is worth more than Dell. Stocks go up and down, and things may be different tomorrow, but I thought it was worth a moment of reflection today. Steve.

Apple since then has gone from success to success.

So what is the secret of Steve Jobs? It is a complex subject but one that, more so than ever before, deserves to be analysed, dissected and disseminated. To really understand the phenomenon that is Steve Jobs, we have to understand him as a person and the key to understanding him is his spiritual quest. Steve Jobs was adopted as a child and whether that had anything to do with the intensification of that quest, is hard to tell. However, it manifested itself at a very early age. He dropped out of college after one semester because he could not bear to be a financial drain on his parents. To survive, he slept on the floor of his friends? dorm rooms, ate at the local Krishna temple run by ISKCON, and collected and recycled soft drink bottles for the 5 cents on every bottle that the government of California mandated for every bottle returned. However, he continued to audit courses, and the one formative class that he took, mentioned most memorably in his Stanford commencement address of 2005, was on calligraphy. It encapsulated everything that Steve Jobs valued about aesthetics and was to play a crucial role in the design of the Macintosh and its beautiful Postscript-based typefaces.

Most people don?t know it, but he along with a friend from college actually came to India in the summer of 1974 to visit Neem Karoli Baba. Unbeknownst to them, he had unfortunately passed away a few months earlier and so the visit to India did not yield the expected fruits. But the quest continued and upon his return to the US, Jobs became involved with the San Francisco Zen Center where his mentor was the Zen roshi Kobun Otogawa. In 1991, Otogawa presided over Steve Jobs? marriage to Laurene.

Jobs was very much influenced by the Japanese Zen concept of ma?or gap. This is how emptiness interacts with form or rather how emptiness defines form. The classic example is that of a ring?the hole defines the ring. A good ring designer needs to emphasise the hole as much as the ring. What you leave out has to speak as eloquently as what you put in. There are also the principles of Kanso and Yohaku-no-bi, which are the elimination of clutter and understatement respectively.

Apple was certainly not the first company to exemplify this aesthetic. Steve Jobs himself was obsessed in the 70s with the consumer electronics icon of its time, Sony, which was the design pioneer of the day until it lost its way in the 1980s. (How and why that happened will be the subject of my next column.)

One consequence of his spiritual approach is that Steve Jobs also puts in his values in his products. In a wonderful interview that Jobs gave many years ago, he was asked how he designed such wonderful products.

His answer was striking. It is not about how good products are designed but how good products are used, he said. Jobs described his family?s then recent process purchase of a washing machine. For two weeks, the entire talk on the dinner table was about what washing machines accomplish and how they do it. How much water do they take? How much time do they take? How clean are the clothes afterwards? How much detergent is left on the clothes after they are washed? How brutal is the process on the clothes? And further, how would such tradeoffs gel with the values of the Jobs family?

It turned out that the company that had really thought through the process was the German company Miele whose products were rarely available in the US, but Jobs sought them out and purchased their washing machine. This is not very different, it seems, from how he designs products. He sees how they would be used, what are the tradeoffs, what values they espouse and once he immerses himself in this process, the entire product is distilled into one blinding flash of the obvious where everything hangs together.

This then is the secret formula?an intimate awareness of how a product should be used, how it encapsulates the values of the user, the interplay between what is included and what is excluded, and how the product comes together as a harmonious whole in one blinding flash.

The word that Jobs used was grok. This word was coined by Robert Heinlein in his science fiction work Stranger in a Strange Land and has not been in common use since the 1960s except in computer science circles. It means ?to drink? in Martian since it is the sound that water makes when it is swallowed. The equivalent Hindi word would be gatakna or to swallow whole. Metaphorically it connotes ?to identify or be one with?, as in Zen where the related word is pragya which is used when there is direct and complete perception of something. Here is wishing Steve Jobs lots of groks, more pragya, and a very long life.

The author is visiting professor of business policy at IIM-Ahmedabad, and academic director with Duke University?s corporate education arm, Duke CE