With Steve Jobs‘ health in the news recently, investors, customers and Apple employees have all started to ask themselves a single question:
What happens when Steve leaves?
Many tech companies have made successful transitions to next-gen leadership; think Intel, IBM and Microsoft. Others have not; think Hewlett Packard under Carly Fiorina. Where does Apple stand?
Apple will of course need a technologist with passion, argue Norm Smallwood, Kate Sweetman, and Dave Ulrich in After Steve Jobs, What Kind of Leader Will Apple Need? But perhaps even more important is a leader with business and management savvy, they opine on Harvard Business Publishing:
He or she will also have to get the organization to button up on execution, create talent to meet new business opportunities, and peer into the future to ensure that the workforce and workplace of tomorrow meets the business needs of tomorrow.
I couldn’t agree less.
That’s way too big a job description for one person to fill, at least at Apple.
Apple tried the “visionary technologist with business savvy” route three times after Jobs departed Apple in 1985. And all that successive CEOs John Sculley, Michael Spindler and Gil Amelio managed to do was drive Apple to the brink of bankruptcy.
The power of the company, and its weakness, too, is that on the product side one person runs the show. Jobs is the Product Picker, the Standard Setter, the Talent Magnet who brings out the best from his extraordinary team. That’s a full-time job. Leave the organizational side to an organizational visionary.
Every company eventually transitions from one leader to the next, and that will happen at Apple some day. How do you think Apple will survive in a post-Jobs era? What kind of transition planning should the company be doing now?
