Plan for After Your Successor

Inside Apple - Chapter 8 "Plan for After Your Successor"

In the days and weeks after Steve Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple on August 24 2011, there was much hand wringing about the future of the company. In his final weeks, Jobs remained as involved in Apple as his strength allowed him to be.

The day before his death, the company unveiled a new iPhone, the iPhone 4S, which included an eight-megapixel camera, a faster processor than the iPhone 4 and Siri, the voice activated personal assistant Jobs had queried at his last board meeting as CEO.

Building a team of lieutenants
During his final days he said he had confidence that Tim Cook and the rest of the executive management team will do a terrific job, executing the exciting plans they had in place in 2011. The keyword he used was “executing” - the implication being that Job’s loyal lieutenants were capably following through on a game plan Jobs already had crafted and approved.

Concentrating at one big thing at a time
Employees liked to say there were two kinds of projects at Apple: the ones Steve Jobs was obsessed over and all the others. Apple tends to be a one big thing at a time company, reflecting the legendary CEO’s willingness to concentrate only on one big thing at a time.

When the first iPhone was under development, for example, the scheduled update of the operating system for the Macintosh was delayed by months because of the resource pulled to focus on the first mobile operating system.

Bridging the gap between Aesthetics and Functionality
Technology wonks like to gripe that Apple’s products look more beautiful than they are. In other words, Apple is accused of sacrificing mechanical design for industrial design. It’s a debatable point, as these same critics typically will say that Apple’s less than perfect products are still better than anyone else’s. Apple’s emphasis on aesthetics over functionality is directly attributable to the leadership of Steve Jobs.

Managing Wealth
Jobs treated Cash as if he had lived through the Great Depression. Jobs was notoriously stingy when it came to giving away money. He argued that the most Philanthropic action Apple could take was to increase the value of the company so shareholders could give away their wealth to causes of their choice, not Apple’s.

Math oriented Google v/s Design oriented Apple
If Google wants to determine the correct colour for a new web page, it would analyse the click through rates. Google takes a democratic approach. At Google, crowd sourcing works.

In the Apple way, Steve picked up the colour he liked and that’s the colour - User democracy is the antithesis of how Apple operates. Steve would listen to counterarguments, but if someone was arguing taste or opinion it was a losing battle

Stagnation causes Corporate Death
Steve Jobs started thinking about causes of corporate death at an unusually young age. He understood that one of the biggest challenges facing established companies and people for that matter was stagnation. He said in an interview “I’ve always felt death is the greatest invention of life. I’m sure that life evolved without death at first and found that without death, life didn’t work very well because it didn’t make room for the young.

The bigger you get, the harder it is to nimble. How do you grow big and stay small? That still is a fundamental question.

Tim Cook undoubtedly is mindful of his own weakness and the hole that Steve Jobs left. There’s no way he’ll aim to remake Apple in his own image. The trick will be finding the right leaders who can guide Apple in a way that Steve Jobs would have. In this regard, Tim Cook maybe a caretaker CEO of Apple, even if his regency lasts ten years.