Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [102]
Microsoft’s Ballmer once said the same thing about his former boss: “You cannot replace Bill Gates. You can run a great company, but you shouldn’t think you’re going to replace a guy who’s a founder. . . . You can’t think about it that way; it’s wrong-minded.”
The same is true of Apple. Quite rightly, many worry that Jobs’s charismatic leadership will never be replaced. Jobs’s successor may be able to keep the lights on, but they worry the spark will be lost. For several years, Sculley managed to grow Apple, but without a vision to unify the company, it eventually became fractured, undisciplined, and, ultimately, dangerously close to bankruptcy.
Sculley typified what happens at many companies when charismatic leaders are replaced by more traditional leaders, even if the company has successfully routinized the founder’s philosophy. Traditional business leaders concentrate on the basics, such as marketing or extending existing brands. Sculley was a traditional leader. He grew Apple by staying the course, by doing more of the same. He concentrated on operations rather than innovations. Apple grew because the entire PC industry was growing so fast at the time. Sculley kept Apple from falling off the crest of a huge wave.
Some observers worry that Cook and other possible successors may do as Scully did. As an operations guy, Cook may keep the company afloat for years—even grow it—but what will happen to Apple’s innovation? Will the genius for invention be lost?
Perhaps what Apple needs is a wildly creative inventor at the helm—someone like Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway? But replacing Jobs with a wildly creative CEO might be even more dangerous. It’s easy to imagine a maverick CEO who thinks he’s Steve Jobs but turns out ill-conceived products that no one wants—like the Segway.
Apple clearly has a deep bench, but without a strong coach, will Apple’s team succumb to groupthink? Without a strong taste-maker like Jobs, will the company fall into decision by committee, like so many other companies?
Whether this happens or not remains to be seen, but the best evidence that Apple will be fine without Jobs lies with his other company, Pixar (now owned by Disney).
Apple and Pixar are based on the same “generate-and-test” creative process, which allows products to be discovered during the prototyping process.
Jobs never managed Pixar the same way he manages Apple—he was pretty much the absentee owner. But Pixar has produced one blockbuster after another, and it has done so without Jobs overseeing the process.
But to assume Jobs’s successor would do the same things as Jobs is absurd. His successor will do things differently. Succession at Apple will be painful, certainly, and probably not without missteps, but Jonathan Ive, whose talent is unquestioned, will carry the torch for Apple’s industrial design. Phil Schiller will ensure that Apple continues to excel at marketing, and Cook will be in charge, making sure Apple’s well-oiled machine runs like clockwork. As we’ve seen, one of Jobs’s great talents is spotting talent in others. He’s always had a knack for recruiting great people, and he’s put together a great team at Apple.
“It’s incredibly naïve to look at Apple and assume that it only runs because of Steve Jobs,” said Jason Snell, editor of Macworld. “That’s a fairy tale of incredible proportion. The company runs so well because it has a group of people who have shown they know how to be consistently successful.”
There may even be upsides to having someone else run Apple. Jobs has brought a certain rigidity and ruthlessness to the job. Apple without Jobs’s penchant for secrecy and total control might be a bit looser, a bit more open. It might communicate better with its customers and the press.
Apple after Jobs will never be the same, and it may in fact flounder. Only time will tell. But it may also be like AC/DC with Bon Scott, or Van Halen with Sammy Hagar—a pair of bands that arguably enjoyed