11 ms·

How Tim Cook is changing Apple

193 points by maayank 14y ago

CharlesPal 14y ago
"Steve Jobs' successor is making his mark and trying to keep the Apple magic going." I think that says it all.
nicholassmith 14y ago
The more I read about Cook the more I think he was the right choice for the role. Trying to replace Jobs with another Jobs-lite CEO wouldn't have worked, because they wouldn't have been Steve. It's clear Cook cares about the company and wants to drive it forward, and it's clear that things aren't as focused on letting the engineers rule the roost, but we'll judge him over the next 5 years rather than when he's barely had chance to settle into the seat.
- danso 14y ago
  Were the engineers ruling the roost in Steve Jobs' years? The story has seemed to be that the designers/visionaries steered/put the engineers in their place.
  - nicholassmith 14y ago
    From what the article says it was the engineers, but I think you're right on the money on that.
- forensic 14y ago
  The whole point is that the engineers did not rule. Jobs and the other "humanities" types ruled. A Zen meditator ruled and the engineers and supply chain nerds had to sing to the tune of the "artists". Lots of engineers run companies and most of them have terrible taste and product ugly, non-innovative stuff that is anti-human. Then they hire some designers to spray perfume on their steaming turd. This is what every non-Apple computer company did and most of them are still doing it, just now they have updated Apple products to rip-off.
mrich 14y ago
Cook is running Apple well and should be applauded for implementing changes that make Apple a modern company with social responsibility. But in the end he will be judged on whether he can come up with new, innovative products and lead them to success. All products released during his tenure have been iterations as the article mentions.
- cmdkeen 14y ago
  You mean whether Apple can come up with new, innovative products. Cook should be able to recognise good from bad and keep an eye on quality, but not be expected to come up with The Next Big Thing. Read some of Ive's infrequent interviews, he uses the word "we" never "I" to discuss the design process. That is what makes Apple so successful.
  - EnderMB 14y ago
    Absolutely. I'd also be shocked if Jobs had left his post without leaving some handover notes and a couple of potential ideas for the future. Jobs seemed to have a good relationship with some of his employees and I'm sure that there is a lot left in Apple for the next five-to-ten years.
  - sp332 14y ago
    Or because he's British and uses the royal "we" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_we https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_we :)
    - easp 14y ago
      I can't speak to Ive's personality in particular, but many product designers view their work as inherently collaborative.
- andr3w321 14y ago
  Yeah and in the mean time he'll be paid 60 mil a year to ride Steve Jobs' coattails.
sparknlaunch12 14y ago
Completely tough job to follow in the foot steps of big figure like Jobs. You wish Cook all the best in the new role. If he succeeds, Jobs will get the credit for leaving a strong legacy. If he fails, he can only be g forgiven for not being Steve Jobs. Nevertheless what a fantastic opportunity to be involved with a leading company.
cageface 14y ago
Indeed, the vibe, in the words of a former employee, is of an Apple that is becoming "far more traditional," meaning more MBAs, more process, and more structure. This doesn't sound like a positive development to me. This kind of structure almost always seems to lead to less accountability and more business-speak bullshit.
- roqetman 14y ago
  "Apple under Tim Cook will embrace efficiency to an even greater degree" - I've never seen a company that starts adding project managers to a process that is deemed "inefficient" but profitable that has led to a long-term improvement. In the short-term things look better with all the new "documentation" of process, but it devolves into managers meeting for the meetings themselves, and the HiPPO syndrome (Highest Paid Person's Opinion).
  - hessenwolf 14y ago
    Documentation... shudder. I used to, sadly, enjoying documenting my work, but now I am in a multinational and have to document for regulators and risk management, as opposed to future users or replacement developers. Not to sound to biased, but project management-style documentation is all completely horrific, obfuscating bloat.
    - nnnnni 14y ago
      I've been forced into a Six Sigma committee at work. It's horrible. We've spent the last half year basically establishing what we knew before the whole thing started. Documentation like that seems to be 100% bloat that is designed to make people feel like they're doing something to earn the upper management title.
- saturdaysaint 14y ago
  A lot of those descriptions reminded me an an awful lot of doomsday descriptions I've read of Google and Facebook over the years, though. Granted the circumstances were different - they're much newer companies and they needed experienced executives to grow - but it shows that sometimes these things make sense. The growing M&A team Lashinsky describes is a good case in point. Cook handled that when they had a fraction of the $110 Billion they have today. They started adding specialists when Google swooped in and acquired AdMob, and have done well since (Siri, Anobit, Chomp). Considering how much more competitive the talent market has become, this strikes me as perfectly logical.
doubleconfess 14y ago
Apple has been an outlier kind of performer under Steve Jobs, because Jobs was an outlier kind of human being. All I take away from that article is that people better start tempering their expectations of this new Apple, because once the product pipeline that Jobs oversaw is depleted, what we have left is merely a "very good" company built on a great foundation. So much of the article seemed to point out the Tim Cook was friendlier in terms of investor relationships, but who cares about that (from a technologist point of view)? I mean, the biggest indicator of the shift in their priorities is that they took 100 billion dollars in cash and used it for stock buybacks and dividends. Can you imagine Google doing such a thing? They would never dream of this, because they are too busy re-investing their profits with their big-picture potentially world changing research projects. But hey, kudos for Tim Cook for not trying to be someone he is not, he's a money and operations guy. So money and operations will get looked at at the expensive of innovation. But this is not good for those who are used to miracles from Apple: "It looks like it has become a more conservative execution engine rather than a pushing-the-envelope engineering engine," says Max Paley, a former engineering vice president who worked at Apple for 14 years until late 2011. "I've been told that any meeting of significance is now always populated by project management and global-supply management," he says. "When I was there, engineering decided what we wanted, and it was the job of product management and supply management to go get it. It shows a shift in priority." Yuck. The geek inside dies a little at reading this.
- sp332 14y ago
  Imagine an engineer knowing there's less NAND flash available and it's getting more expensive. So they can focus on giving the software a smaller storage footprint. Now the product is the same, but because engineering and global-supply management worked together, the product is cheaper.
  - pork 14y ago
    That's not innovation, that's incremental optimization.
    - niketdesai 14y ago
didgeoridoo 14y ago
>>>In a February appearance at an investor conference hosted by Goldman Sachs, for example, he mentioned that he had worked at a paper mill in Alabama and an aluminum plant in Virginia The most incredible people always have the least predictable life stories.
- smackfu 14y ago
  Heh, this is actually a predictable path. He has a BS in industrial engineering, and typically that means you do work in plants in the middle of nowhere where labor is cheap.
  - didgeoridoo 14y ago
    Ah I suppose I'm guilty of romanticizing it a bit -- I rather imagined him to be working on an assembly line.
    - smackfu 14y ago
      Well, it is true that it is more of a blue collar job than many others, even if you are in management or doing engineering work on the line. I had a friend who worked at a paper products factory in rural Pennsylvania as an IE as his first job out of school, and he didn't care for it. The kind of area where everyone young just wants to leave, and you are coming in as a 21 year old. Not fun. And I particularly remember he had to buy a 4WD Jeep because the plant was always open but they didn't do a good job plowing roads.
  - mturmon 14y ago
    From wiki: "Cook [was born in 1960 and] grew up in Robertsdale, Alabama, near Mobile. His father was a shipyard worker, while his mother was a homemaker. Cook graduated from high school at Robertsdale High School, earned a B.S. degree in industrial engineering from Auburn University in 1982, and his M.B.A. from Duke University's Fuqua School of Business in 1988." His family might have been blue-collar, but you seem to be right in that after graduation in 1982 he would have been 22, and presumably taken a regular white-collar job and later entered business school. Pretty standard trajectory.
saturdaysaint 14y ago
His attitude toward the competition (Amazon and Samsung) strikes me as similar to Jobs' decidedly friendlier attitude toward Microsoft when he returned to Apple. I think this bodes well for Apple. The only way for Apple to stay where they are in the technology landscape is to continuously disrupt their most successful products - in other words, they need to have products so good in the pipeline that they take the present day competition in stride.
Feoh 14y ago
I didn't draw the same conclusions that others seem to be drawing from this article. Having been in the tech industry for over 20 years now, I can tell you that a company's CEO having a firm grasp on the business side is nothing but win. This doesn't mean that Apple will become Microsoft, or that all the technical innovation will end, it simply means that they are taking the steps they need to take to ensure that the techies will be ABLE to keep innovating. But, don't let me get in the way of a good hand wringing session :)
myspy 14y ago
As long as they release great products and make existing products better, I'm happy. If not, I have to look for other things and I don't really see something which could hold a candle to Apple.
bedris 14y ago
Mark Andreessen, paraphrased: "Salespeople can be very good at optimizing a company over a 2-4 year period. The [Andreessen-Horowitz] fake hedge fund trade is: when a sales guy replaces a product guy as CEO, go long 2 years, then short." Source: http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/22660214207/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-10-notes-essay http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/22660214207/peter-thiels...
- moron 14y ago
  Interesting but Tim Cook is not a "sales guy"
  - bedris 14y ago
    From Apple's website: "Before being named CEO in August 2011, Tim was Apple's Chief Operating Officer and was responsible for all of the company’s worldwide sales and operations..." How does being responsible for all of the company's worldwide sales make Tim Cook not a sales guy?
    - iProject 14y ago
      "Chief Operating Officer" goes far beyond sales. Creation of the Apple supply-management strategies is one example of a domain that was far beyond sales.
    - AllenKids 14y ago
      Phil Schiller is the "sales guy" at Apple, titled SVP of global marketing. Funnily enough, Steve Jobs himself is many times referred to, derogatorily, a master salesman even to this day.
- JumpCrisscross 14y ago
  Just for fun I went through a small sample of US companies who changed from technologist-led to MBA-led; this trade is garbage. Sometimes facts make inconvenient clever quips.
  - 14y ago
firefoxman1 14y ago
I think we all saw this coming. I remember when Cook was first chosen, CNBC kept referring to him as the "logistics guy." That's good news for just about any company but Apple. Sculley was a "logistics guy" and it worked for Pepsi. By 1995 Apple was a bureaucratic, MBA-filled, artist-less mess. Apple isn't HP or Samsung or one of a dozen other bland electronics companies for a reason.
studio816 14y ago
The bit about praising his competitors shows "The Benjamin Franklin Effect" in action: http://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/10/05/the-benjamin-franklin-effect/#more-1459 http://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/10/05/the-benjamin-franklin...
replicatorblog 14y ago
I point to 3 stories of CEO succession that worked. Not every company will turn into HP or Yahoo. A couple co's that had visionary founders have been able to survive for a century or more: Bob Iger taking over from Michael Eisner: Forbes has a nice write up about his time at Disney which reads very much like the profile of Cook. Iger is a quiet delegator, but has had a tremendous amount of success. http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2012/05/09/500-disney-iger/ http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2012/05/09/500-disney-iger... Michael Eisner taking over from Walt Disney: He didn't directly follow Walt, but Eisner reinvigorated an iconic company that was rudderless after Walt died. Paints a picture of what Apple might have looked like if people asked "What Would Steve Do" at every turn. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/20/books/review/020LEONAR.html http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/20/books/review/020LEONAR.htm... Jack Welch taking over from Thomas Edison: Again, not directly, but GE was on the ropes when Jack rose to the top and employed a strategy very different from the founder to get 20 years of solid growth. http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/apr2008/ca2008049_455024.htm http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/apr2008/ca20080... Ultimately, you want someone with a vision at the top, even if it's not the same vision as the founder. Cook seems to have a plan and can execute on it well. Give the guy a chance!
- jshen 14y ago
  I don't know the story of all of these, but I know that Iger was at Disney for years before becoming CEO. He was promoted up, and not some outside former CEO that was brought in. Same with Cook, and I believe this same is true of Welch. Maybe there is something to promoting from within vs hiring some former CEO?
  - maayank 14y ago
    Funny you mention it, that is exactly the subject of a new Economist story[1][2] [1] http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/05/daily-chart-15 http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/05/daily-c... [2] link from within the charts page above: http://www.economist.com/node/21555895 http://www.economist.com/node/21555895
    - 14y ago
arthurrr 14y ago
I think what's going to happen eventually is that the A-level engineers are all going to leave Apple and start their own company, when they start getting frusterated with the new Apple. I don't think Tim Cook understands the arguably 25:1 dynamic range that exists in software the way Steve Jobs did.
silentscope 14y ago
This is what's referred to by reporters as a "snow job".
jfaucett 14y ago
so Jobs has been gone 6 months and the previous #1 company in the world is still number one and didn't collape? I think we need to wait at least a couple years before any statement can be made about the CEO's leadership abilities... just saying
philip1209 14y ago
> If anything, Apple under Tim Cook will embrace efficiency to an even greater degree, especially as the company grows bigger and more complex -- to the dismay of those who think techies should rule the roost. I don't understand this line of logic. Tim has an engineering degree, and optimizations are a core of 'techies.'
sparknlaunch12 14y ago
Just heard a podcast with Adam Lashinsky. He is the Senior Editor at Fortunate magazine and author of a book on Apple. In the podcast: "[Lashinsky] shares an insider look at Apple, one of the world's most iconic and secretive companies. Based on his research into the technology giant's internal processes and approaches to leadership and building products, Lashinsky offers insights and surprises from his book, Inside Apple: How America's Most Admired--and Secretive--Company Really Works." Cook was the supply chain guru Jobs employed to turn Apple's supply chain model into one like Dell's. No surprise with this knowledge Cook is now CEO of Apple. [1] http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2931 http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2931
- Drbble 14y ago
  And he is taking Michael Dell's advice to give money back to the shareholders.
damian2000 14y ago
Apple has gone from the disruptive upstart to the elephant in the room that everyone will be trying to take down in the future.

193 points by maayank 14y ago

"Steve Jobs' successor is making his mark and trying to keep the Apple magic going." I think that says it all.

The more I read about Cook the more I think he was the right choice for the role. Trying to replace Jobs with another Jobs-lite CEO wouldn't have worked, because they wouldn't have been Steve. It's clear Cook cares about the company and wants to drive it forward, and it's clear that things aren't as focused on letting the engineers rule the roost, but we'll judge him over the next 5 years rather than when he's barely had chance to settle into the seat.

danso 14y ago
Were the engineers ruling the roost in Steve Jobs' years? The story has seemed to be that the designers/visionaries steered/put the engineers in their place.
- nicholassmith 14y ago
  From what the article says it was the engineers, but I think you're right on the money on that.
forensic 14y ago
The whole point is that the engineers did not rule. Jobs and the other "humanities" types ruled. A Zen meditator ruled and the engineers and supply chain nerds had to sing to the tune of the "artists". Lots of engineers run companies and most of them have terrible taste and product ugly, non-innovative stuff that is anti-human. Then they hire some designers to spray perfume on their steaming turd. This is what every non-Apple computer company did and most of them are still doing it, just now they have updated Apple products to rip-off.

mrich 14y ago

Cook is running Apple well and should be applauded for implementing changes that make Apple a modern company with social responsibility. But in the end he will be judged on whether he can come up with new, innovative products and lead them to success. All products released during his tenure have been iterations as the article mentions.

cmdkeen 14y ago
You mean whether Apple can come up with new, innovative products. Cook should be able to recognise good from bad and keep an eye on quality, but not be expected to come up with The Next Big Thing. Read some of Ive's infrequent interviews, he uses the word "we" never "I" to discuss the design process. That is what makes Apple so successful.
- EnderMB 14y ago
  Absolutely. I'd also be shocked if Jobs had left his post without leaving some handover notes and a couple of potential ideas for the future. Jobs seemed to have a good relationship with some of his employees and I'm sure that there is a lot left in Apple for the next five-to-ten years.
- sp332 14y ago
  Or because he's British and uses the royal "we" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_we https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_we :)
  - easp 14y ago
    I can't speak to Ive's personality in particular, but many product designers view their work as inherently collaborative.
andr3w321 14y ago
Yeah and in the mean time he'll be paid 60 mil a year to ride Steve Jobs' coattails.

sparknlaunch12 14y ago

Completely tough job to follow in the foot steps of big figure like Jobs. You wish Cook all the best in the new role. If he succeeds, Jobs will get the credit for leaving a strong legacy. If he fails, he can only be g forgiven for not being Steve Jobs. Nevertheless what a fantastic opportunity to be involved with a leading company.

cageface 14y ago

Indeed, the vibe, in the words of a former employee, is of an Apple that is becoming "far more traditional," meaning more MBAs, more process, and more structure. This doesn't sound like a positive development to me. This kind of structure almost always seems to lead to less accountability and more business-speak bullshit.

roqetman 14y ago
"Apple under Tim Cook will embrace efficiency to an even greater degree" - I've never seen a company that starts adding project managers to a process that is deemed "inefficient" but profitable that has led to a long-term improvement. In the short-term things look better with all the new "documentation" of process, but it devolves into managers meeting for the meetings themselves, and the HiPPO syndrome (Highest Paid Person's Opinion).
- hessenwolf 14y ago
  Documentation... shudder. I used to, sadly, enjoying documenting my work, but now I am in a multinational and have to document for regulators and risk management, as opposed to future users or replacement developers. Not to sound to biased, but project management-style documentation is all completely horrific, obfuscating bloat.
  - nnnnni 14y ago
    I've been forced into a Six Sigma committee at work. It's horrible. We've spent the last half year basically establishing what we knew before the whole thing started. Documentation like that seems to be 100% bloat that is designed to make people feel like they're doing something to earn the upper management title.
saturdaysaint 14y ago
A lot of those descriptions reminded me an an awful lot of doomsday descriptions I've read of Google and Facebook over the years, though. Granted the circumstances were different - they're much newer companies and they needed experienced executives to grow - but it shows that sometimes these things make sense. The growing M&A team Lashinsky describes is a good case in point. Cook handled that when they had a fraction of the $110 Billion they have today. They started adding specialists when Google swooped in and acquired AdMob, and have done well since (Siri, Anobit, Chomp). Considering how much more competitive the talent market has become, this strikes me as perfectly logical.

doubleconfess 14y ago

Apple has been an outlier kind of performer under Steve Jobs, because Jobs was an outlier kind of human being. All I take away from that article is that people better start tempering their expectations of this new Apple, because once the product pipeline that Jobs oversaw is depleted, what we have left is merely a "very good" company built on a great foundation. So much of the article seemed to point out the Tim Cook was friendlier in terms of investor relationships, but who cares about that (from a technologist point of view)? I mean, the biggest indicator of the shift in their priorities is that they took 100 billion dollars in cash and used it for stock buybacks and dividends. Can you imagine Google doing such a thing? They would never dream of this, because they are too busy re-investing their profits with their big-picture potentially world changing research projects. But hey, kudos for Tim Cook for not trying to be someone he is not, he's a money and operations guy. So money and operations will get looked at at the expensive of innovation. But this is not good for those who are used to miracles from Apple: "It looks like it has become a more conservative execution engine rather than a pushing-the-envelope engineering engine," says Max Paley, a former engineering vice president who worked at Apple for 14 years until late 2011. "I've been told that any meeting of significance is now always populated by project management and global-supply management," he says. "When I was there, engineering decided what we wanted, and it was the job of product management and supply management to go get it. It shows a shift in priority." Yuck. The geek inside dies a little at reading this.

sp332 14y ago
Imagine an engineer knowing there's less NAND flash available and it's getting more expensive. So they can focus on giving the software a smaller storage footprint. Now the product is the same, but because engineering and global-supply management worked together, the product is cheaper.
- pork 14y ago
  That's not innovation, that's incremental optimization.
  - niketdesai 14y ago

didgeoridoo 14y ago

>>>In a February appearance at an investor conference hosted by Goldman Sachs, for example, he mentioned that he had worked at a paper mill in Alabama and an aluminum plant in Virginia The most incredible people always have the least predictable life stories.

smackfu 14y ago
Heh, this is actually a predictable path. He has a BS in industrial engineering, and typically that means you do work in plants in the middle of nowhere where labor is cheap.
- didgeoridoo 14y ago
  Ah I suppose I'm guilty of romanticizing it a bit -- I rather imagined him to be working on an assembly line.
  - smackfu 14y ago
    Well, it is true that it is more of a blue collar job than many others, even if you are in management or doing engineering work on the line. I had a friend who worked at a paper products factory in rural Pennsylvania as an IE as his first job out of school, and he didn't care for it. The kind of area where everyone young just wants to leave, and you are coming in as a 21 year old. Not fun. And I particularly remember he had to buy a 4WD Jeep because the plant was always open but they didn't do a good job plowing roads.
- mturmon 14y ago
  From wiki: "Cook [was born in 1960 and] grew up in Robertsdale, Alabama, near Mobile. His father was a shipyard worker, while his mother was a homemaker. Cook graduated from high school at Robertsdale High School, earned a B.S. degree in industrial engineering from Auburn University in 1982, and his M.B.A. from Duke University's Fuqua School of Business in 1988." His family might have been blue-collar, but you seem to be right in that after graduation in 1982 he would have been 22, and presumably taken a regular white-collar job and later entered business school. Pretty standard trajectory.

saturdaysaint 14y ago

His attitude toward the competition (Amazon and Samsung) strikes me as similar to Jobs' decidedly friendlier attitude toward Microsoft when he returned to Apple. I think this bodes well for Apple. The only way for Apple to stay where they are in the technology landscape is to continuously disrupt their most successful products - in other words, they need to have products so good in the pipeline that they take the present day competition in stride.

Feoh 14y ago

I didn't draw the same conclusions that others seem to be drawing from this article. Having been in the tech industry for over 20 years now, I can tell you that a company's CEO having a firm grasp on the business side is nothing but win. This doesn't mean that Apple will become Microsoft, or that all the technical innovation will end, it simply means that they are taking the steps they need to take to ensure that the techies will be ABLE to keep innovating. But, don't let me get in the way of a good hand wringing session :)

myspy 14y ago

As long as they release great products and make existing products better, I'm happy. If not, I have to look for other things and I don't really see something which could hold a candle to Apple.

bedris 14y ago

Mark Andreessen, paraphrased: "Salespeople can be very good at optimizing a company over a 2-4 year period. The [Andreessen-Horowitz] fake hedge fund trade is: when a sales guy replaces a product guy as CEO, go long 2 years, then short." Source: http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/22660214207/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-10-notes-essay http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/22660214207/peter-thiels...

moron 14y ago
Interesting but Tim Cook is not a "sales guy"
- bedris 14y ago
  From Apple's website: "Before being named CEO in August 2011, Tim was Apple's Chief Operating Officer and was responsible for all of the company’s worldwide sales and operations..." How does being responsible for all of the company's worldwide sales make Tim Cook not a sales guy?
  - iProject 14y ago
    "Chief Operating Officer" goes far beyond sales. Creation of the Apple supply-management strategies is one example of a domain that was far beyond sales.
  - AllenKids 14y ago
    Phil Schiller is the "sales guy" at Apple, titled SVP of global marketing. Funnily enough, Steve Jobs himself is many times referred to, derogatorily, a master salesman even to this day.
JumpCrisscross 14y ago
Just for fun I went through a small sample of US companies who changed from technologist-led to MBA-led; this trade is garbage. Sometimes facts make inconvenient clever quips.
- 14y ago

firefoxman1 14y ago

I think we all saw this coming. I remember when Cook was first chosen, CNBC kept referring to him as the "logistics guy." That's good news for just about any company but Apple. Sculley was a "logistics guy" and it worked for Pepsi. By 1995 Apple was a bureaucratic, MBA-filled, artist-less mess. Apple isn't HP or Samsung or one of a dozen other bland electronics companies for a reason.

studio816 14y ago

The bit about praising his competitors shows "The Benjamin Franklin Effect" in action: http://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/10/05/the-benjamin-franklin-effect/#more-1459 http://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/10/05/the-benjamin-franklin...

replicatorblog 14y ago

I point to 3 stories of CEO succession that worked. Not every company will turn into HP or Yahoo. A couple co's that had visionary founders have been able to survive for a century or more: Bob Iger taking over from Michael Eisner: Forbes has a nice write up about his time at Disney which reads very much like the profile of Cook. Iger is a quiet delegator, but has had a tremendous amount of success. http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2012/05/09/500-disney-iger/ http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2012/05/09/500-disney-iger... Michael Eisner taking over from Walt Disney: He didn't directly follow Walt, but Eisner reinvigorated an iconic company that was rudderless after Walt died. Paints a picture of what Apple might have looked like if people asked "What Would Steve Do" at every turn. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/20/books/review/020LEONAR.html http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/20/books/review/020LEONAR.htm... Jack Welch taking over from Thomas Edison: Again, not directly, but GE was on the ropes when Jack rose to the top and employed a strategy very different from the founder to get 20 years of solid growth. http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/apr2008/ca2008049_455024.htm http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/apr2008/ca20080... Ultimately, you want someone with a vision at the top, even if it's not the same vision as the founder. Cook seems to have a plan and can execute on it well. Give the guy a chance!

jshen 14y ago
I don't know the story of all of these, but I know that Iger was at Disney for years before becoming CEO. He was promoted up, and not some outside former CEO that was brought in. Same with Cook, and I believe this same is true of Welch. Maybe there is something to promoting from within vs hiring some former CEO?
- maayank 14y ago
  Funny you mention it, that is exactly the subject of a new Economist story[1][2] [1] http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/05/daily-chart-15 http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/05/daily-c... [2] link from within the charts page above: http://www.economist.com/node/21555895 http://www.economist.com/node/21555895
  - 14y ago

arthurrr 14y ago

I think what's going to happen eventually is that the A-level engineers are all going to leave Apple and start their own company, when they start getting frusterated with the new Apple. I don't think Tim Cook understands the arguably 25:1 dynamic range that exists in software the way Steve Jobs did.

silentscope 14y ago

This is what's referred to by reporters as a "snow job".

jfaucett 14y ago

so Jobs has been gone 6 months and the previous #1 company in the world is still number one and didn't collape? I think we need to wait at least a couple years before any statement can be made about the CEO's leadership abilities... just saying

philip1209 14y ago

> If anything, Apple under Tim Cook will embrace efficiency to an even greater degree, especially as the company grows bigger and more complex -- to the dismay of those who think techies should rule the roost. I don't understand this line of logic. Tim has an engineering degree, and optimizations are a core of 'techies.'

sparknlaunch12 14y ago

Just heard a podcast with Adam Lashinsky. He is the Senior Editor at Fortunate magazine and author of a book on Apple. In the podcast: "[Lashinsky] shares an insider look at Apple, one of the world's most iconic and secretive companies. Based on his research into the technology giant's internal processes and approaches to leadership and building products, Lashinsky offers insights and surprises from his book, Inside Apple: How America's Most Admired--and Secretive--Company Really Works." Cook was the supply chain guru Jobs employed to turn Apple's supply chain model into one like Dell's. No surprise with this knowledge Cook is now CEO of Apple. [1] http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2931 http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2931

Drbble 14y ago
And he is taking Michael Dell's advice to give money back to the shareholders.

damian2000 14y ago

Apple has gone from the disruptive upstart to the elephant in the room that everyone will be trying to take down in the future.