Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [96]
The financial magazine Barron’s suggested that Jobs may be worth more than any other chief executive in the world, estimating that Apple’s market cap would take a massive $20 billion hit if Jobs ever stepped down as CEO.
Wall Street called on Jobs to disclose his succession plan—if he had one. Investors wanted assurance that the company would be in good hands.
Apple fans also were puzzled by what appeared to be a rare oversight. So far, Jobs had done everything right. He had made so few missteps running Apple, surely he had planned for what came next? It seemed jarringly out of place for the man who thought through everything to remain so nonchalant about such a dire circumstance. Surely he had worked out his own succession plan? For some, it seemed to be the single biggest management failure that Jobs had ever made.
Others noted that Jobs did in fact have a succession plan, but as with most things he did, he kept it secret. Jack Welch, for example, had kept confidential his succession plan at GE. When the plan finally leaked out, there was a mass exodus of disgruntled executives who were passed over. Some say the company never recovered. Likewise, Jobs may have kept his succession plans secret to prevent premature turmoil in the ranks of Apple’s upper management.
In August, the New York Times revealed that Jobs had undergone some sort of surgical procedure earlier in the year, although details were foggy. Jobs was suffering from ongoing “digestive difficulties,” the report said, and may have had an operation to remove a “blockage.”
When the press speculation about his health refused to go away, Jobs phoned New York Times columnist Joe Nocera. “You think I’m an arrogant [expletive] who thinks he’s above the law, and I think you’re a slime bucket who gets most of his facts wrong,” Jobs told the startled writer. Jobs said he’d reveal his health problems to Nocera, but only if he kept them off the record. Nocera agreed. Jobs admitted that he had more than a common bug, but that it wasn’t life threatening, and it wasn’t a return of his cancer. Exactly what he had, and what treatments he’d received, he made Nocera promise to keep secret.
Despite this unusual attempt to set the record straight, reports about Jobs’s poor health continued. In August 2008, Bloomberg accidentally published a 2,500-word obituary of Jobs. His age and cause of death were left blank. Bloomberg, like many other media outlets, had prepared the obituary in case the worst happened.
The media chatter became so loud, Jobs was forced to respond. But he did so on his own terms. At a September special event to show off the holiday lineup of iPods, Jobs started the proceedings with a slide quoting Mark Twain: “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” A month later, he concluded another product presentation with a slide that read “110/70”—his blood pressure. But as the presentation segued into a Q&A, he flatly declared he wouldn’t be saying any more about his health.
In mid-December, Apple dropped a bomb about Macworld, the annual gathering of the Apple clan, where the company had been the star attraction for many years. A terse memo was released after the 2008 conference: Apple would no longer be attending Macworld. And Steve Jobs would not be giving that year’s keynote. Instead, marketing vice president Phil Schiller would deliver the company’s final address