Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [99]
Cook clearly has the operational chops to run a big corporation like Apple with a diverse product portfolio, and seems to have the leadership skills to manage Apple’s executive team.
But many onlookers question whether Cook has the creativity or vision to lead the company. Does he have Jobs’s instinct for design, or his genius for developing revolutionary products? What about Jobs’s unerring instinct for marketing? Surely, observers have noted, all these qualities would be needed for the continued success of Apple?
But the question of whether Apple can survive without Jobs has been partially answered before.
In 1985, Jobs was forced out of Apple after losing a boardroom battle for control of the company with John Sculley. After Jobs left, Sculley ran Apple for ten years, during which he grew it into a very big and powerful company. Under Sculley’s leadership, Apple became one of the largest and most successful PC makers in the world. Its revenues increased tenfold, from $1 billion a year to $10 billion.
Of course, it all went south in the mid-1990s. Sculley quit in 1993 after several quarters of poor performance, and Apple struggled to replace him. After Sculley came a succession of ineffectual CEOs. Apple’s product line became sprawling and confused, and cutthroat competition from Microsoft nearly killed it. The company might easily have ended in bankruptcy if Jobs hadn’t returned to save it—and ultimately lead the company to much greater success.
Of course, the entire computer industry might be very different today if Jobs had stayed on at Apple in ’85, but history shows us that Apple survived for a decade without Jobs, and it will likely do so again, at least for a little while.
The Routinization of Charisma
The most important difference this time around is that Jobs has turned his personality traits into Apple’s business processes. This process is known as the “routinization of charisma,” a phrase coined by German sociologist Max Weber in a classic study of the sociology of religion.
Weber was interested in what happened to religious movements after the passing of their charismatic founders. Most religions begin with prophetic leaders, such as Jesus Christ, Mo hammed, or Buddha, who attract followers with their magnetic personalities and, often, their antitraditional messages. But after those leaders pass, their charisma and message must be “routinized” if the movement is to survive. Their teachings and methods must be institutionalized, becoming the basis of new traditions.
In business, the routinization of charisma is the process of turning a charismatic business leader’s personality traits into a business method. One widely cited study by management experts Janice M. Beyer and Larry D. Browning focused on Sematech, a semiconductor consortium based in Austin, Texas.
Established in the mid-eighties, Sematech was an organization of fourteen U.S. chip makers who joined together to help the American computer industry catch up with the Japanese in chip-making technology. It was led by Bob Noyce, a Silicon Valley legend who had helped invent the integrated circuit and cofounded the chip giant Intel. Sematech had an exceptionally collaborative culture, a feat difficult to achieve among so many rivals in the fiercely competitive chip business. According to Beyer and Browning, the collaborative culture was a direct consequence of Noyce’s exceptionally collaborative and democratic leadership.2
Significantly, this ethos survived well after Noyce’s untimely death from heart failure in 1990, because it had become so entrenched in the organization’s culture. Beyer and Browning concluded that if a leader’s traits become routine, they survive as company traditions. They become so deeply ingrained, they characterize the way a company does business. The “cooperative and democratic practices survive Noyce’s death and still persist,” they wrote of the company.
Other examples studied by academics include Alcoholics Anonymous, whose charismatic founder, Bill Wilson, codified his personal experiences overcoming