Slashdot Mirror
Apple Grooming Next Gen of Executives
capt turnpike writes "The modern Apple as we know it -- the good one with open-source Darwin, with Unix-based OS X, and so on -- was mainly the creation of NeXT: Steve Jobs, Avie Tevanian and Jon Rubenstein. What's going to happen to Apple once this troika leaves? eWEEK.com looks at the orderly transition out of Jon and Avie and asks whether things could go as smoothly should Jobs need to retire." From the article: "At some companies, such a loss of leadership could leave the company with a power vacuum or a lack of direction. However, Apple seems to be conscious that no single person--except, perhaps, CEO Steve Jobs himself--is irreplaceable, and that new talent can always be groomed for the future."
cloning and black turtlenecks
They should just hire someone from something like, oh, say a soda company. Selling computers can't be that different from selling soda...
This guy's the limit!
Not two weeks ago. How ironic Here it is. Interesting to see what regular folks think about this kind of stuff. http://forums.phoenix.craigslist.org/?ID=41833383
"Hey Gary, why are we wearing bras on our heads?"
What is this, a time warp? These days companies don't "groom" new talent, they buy it. They prefer to buy other companies' overhyped leaders, just like they buy other companies' overhyped projects instead of doing their own R&D.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
They are also getting a full shampoo, claw clipping, complete set of shots and, if needed, spaying/neutering.
Apple is rapidly transforming into a digital media company.
The people that were key to the Mac side of the company are growing less and less relevant to the future of the company.
OS X
Mac hardware
and most of the rest of Apple's desktop computing stuff is all going to quietly and gently be phased out of the next few years as the company focuses on the high growth area of consumer computing devices - small, mobile, and wireless.
Look for Apple to replace the Mac/OS X type people with people from companies like Sony and Disney.
The Era of the Desktop Computer is rapidly coming to an end. Companies in that market will survive but it will never be a booming market again. OS X/Windows -> Linux and Apple/Dell ->Asian manufactures over the next few year.
..that there are at least 3, and many, many more well qualified and enthusiastic folks on Slashdot who would be able to do these jobs, who will probably read this post. Hey, you guys, submit your resumes! Maybe even post them here!
;)
BTW, I do not work for Apple. In fact, I hardly use a Mac. That does not mean I don't like them!
SixD
I live all of ten minutes from ol' Stevie, and no one here is worried. Just a bit of hype for the headlines. There are plently of people here who can take over these positions and the company will be just fine, as long as they keep coming out with a new mist-have iPod every month and keep upping prices on certain iTunes downloads. And I'm pretty certain that some of the post-dot-bomb homeless guys will enjoy the grooming and bathing.
It's a girl!
Jobs was ushered out and came back once already. Who's to say that when this "troika" leaves, he won't just come back. If Cher's had 15421 farewell tours, why can't Jobs?
And besides, they can always clone him. He can be like Real Holographic Simulated Evil Lincoln.
Does that mean the actually selling of the soul or just the removal of it?
The Apple iHoover. Vacuum Different.(TM)
Darl McBride would be more than happy to run the company.
Most management I encounter makes me wonder how they got the job in the first place. My current employer boasts the most number of exceptions since my division is relatively new. However, in most organizations, management are the good 'ole boys clubs and these people are not interested in training new managers. Most people with any motivation or interest in management and not part of the club usually get trumped out...yours truly included (a number of times). I am happy to report I have no interest in leadership and no longer seek any management position. At the same time, I see all these articles about IT and management merging. That is like Oil and Water mixing. It ain't gonna work. People who write these articles are dumbasses with no idea of how IT actually works. IT managers would not ship jobs to India, non-IT managers do it everyday. Most people who get promoted from IT into a manager position do not last very long.
Who hides under his desk as a form of stress relief.
They're grooming them over at Pixar and Walt Disney!
John C. Dvorak? I thought that was you! How have you been, old buddy, old pal?
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Mr. Jobs: I have to admit it. We wrote a big AppleScript and it's running the company. Isn't this awesome?
So THAT's the secret...
My sig is too lon
Hm. So, except for the person who personifies the company in every way, everyone's replaceable. That's a pretty big "except."
...available. She has lots of experience running a high tech company. Well ok, she ran a high tech company into the ground but still.
Pick out the lice.
Slosh on the hair grease by the gallon.
Comb all the knots out.
Staunch all the bleeding.
Subject them to lethal doses of RDF radiation.
Slap them into jeans and a turtleneck.
?!?!?!?
Profit?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
It's not ironic. Don't use words you don't know the meaning of.
For centuries, two races have evolved hidden deeply within Apple co. The aristocratic, sophisticated Newtonites, and the brutal, feral Hypercardians. To humanity, their existence is no more than a whisper of a myth. But to each other, they are lifelong mortal rivals, sworn to wage a secret war until only one is left standing. In the midst of this ongoing struggle, an ipod warrior, itunes, discovers a Hypercardian plot to kidnap a young pippin off spring. After shadowing Pippin through the city, the Newtonites forms an unprecedented bond with it, and when the Hypercardians make their next move, Newton is there to fend off their vicious assault. As it races to save Pippin and unravel the Hypercard intrigue surrounding Pippin, the Newtonites discovers a secret that has terrifying repercussions for both Departments--a nefarious plan to awaken a new invincible Application of domination that combines the strengths of both devices and the weaknesses of neither, which threatens to tip the balance of power in favor of the Hypercardians, who have been on the losing end of the struggle for decades. There can only be one! Long live the Jobs.
As opposed to "the bad one" with AppleOS, MacOS through 9, Nu-Bus, etc.?
Wasn't that the same guys? (Or Jobs, anyway).
What makes the OP think that these guys are such altruists?
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
so whoever gives mr. jobs a job gets the job then?
It's the Apple iSuck
Corporate transition plans are actually a critical structure to have in place to ensure the vitality and success of an organization in the event that a key executive needs to depart suddenly, retire, or passes away. Maintaining company focus, shareholder value, quality of deliverables (services, products) can be severly impacted when a company does not have a migration strategy in place, and an event occurs where one or more key players leave or are removed.
The company I work for recently had the COO step down. The exec team had a transition plan in place, though, so day to day operations weren't impacted in the least. The new COO was already familiar w/ operations, the staff, procedures, goals, directions, initiatives of the company, and was able to step in with only a few weeks of transition. Had we not had this plan in place, who knows what the impacts would have been.
Given Jobs' age (50+), this is the appropriate time to begin thinking about succession. It also gives Apple the opportunity to bring a new face to its customers & shareholders to ascertain what the impact on the company's image is; this is a huge concern to Apple, which is one of the few IT companies whose founder/CEO ranks as a 'superstar'.
Apple is a bit like Cuba in this manner; should Jobs/Castro bow out suddenly, the resulting chaos would be catastrophic.
ok, Coward.
Who's the better person?
The one who incorrectly (however very commonly) missused the work ironic, or the person who hides as a coward and yells out from the crowd an insult?
Self proclaimed wannabe geek. You know how it is. Most of us who read this stuff probably fit in that category.
I just cant imagine anyone else leading apple like Jobs has, most other CEO's don't have one thousandth of his strive for perfection and style, I don't really see anyone else as such a working force behind both the design, user interface, marketing and vision like Jobs is. He is indeed irreplaceable. He's more of a prophet than a CEO, a religious, visionary figure.
So they started looking for the best Steve Jobs clone of all the ones they scattered thoughout the world?
I tagged this "darwinbluff", and so should you. It has ceased to be open source, as it can't be built anymore, and almost all Apple Open Source projects are getting the same treatment. They just went along for a while as long as it benefit them . which they are entitled to, but it really grinds my gears that they get good PR for it, when they don't deserve it.
Yes, you can groom new talent for the future, but I don't think you can exactly replace vision. Vision is a unique perspective of an individual, and comes from that individual's particular lifetime of knowledge, experience, and dreams. In this respect, no two people are are alike, or even similar, and it would be rare to find a pair who are even close.
Once Steve Jobs is gone, the next CEO of Apple is going to have a different vision. It may be just as good as Steve's, or better, or worse, but odds are it will not be the same.
Well put...HP almost became another Enron. Good thing they bounced this bitch and headed off the demise of HP at the pass! Could have been real bad here.
I've seen no *unequivocal* proof that the technical quality is identical. From what I've been presented, outsourcing has often caused a quality drop off or cultural/work ethic nightmares to overcome. There may be some instances of similar quality technical output, but often that's not the case. The technical shortcomings are just buried in the accoutning bottom line stressing profit.(which may not be as high as expected and/or not worth the effort or loss in reputation) In the short term it's a great way to generate wealth. But the problem is that in the long run it could impact your product reputation and eventually sales if you can't *guarantee* (and there is no guarantee...it's a hell of a blind investment) similar technical skills. So in the long term, there's a distinct possiblity that outsourcing is self defeating.
If everything is going well...why are you wanting to change it? Why do you want to throw the risk of getting a lousy development team into your mix? Remember the old saying..."if it ain't broke, don't fix it."
They are commodity now. The nick-nacks they sell are RIO based toys(most profitable). I don't know why anyone would be concerned with how apple grooms it's "leadership". Taken from the book of 'who gives a shit'- please move along. The leadership of apple.. OMG.. haha. You guys kill me. 2% is called an outlier, not a point on a graph.
Am I the only one who had a picture of a gaggle of PHB running their fingers through each others back hair, picking out nits and cracking the frantically struggling insects between their teeth. Cuz, really, I can't think of much else for which management would have an aptitude.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
I don't work for Apple, so anyone there should feel free to explain how my hearsay reports about his behavior patterns are wrong.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
And he worked at PepsiCo.
The one who incorrectly (however very commonly) missused the work ironic
That's "word", not "work"; "misused", not "missused".
or the person who hides as a coward and yells out from the crowd an insult?
Insult? Since when is teaching him how to not look like a fool an insult?
I'll post stuff like this as AC until Slashdot lets me post with Score: 0. I don't want to pollute the real discussion (+1 threshold) with stuff that's offtopic.
How is "hiding" as an AC any worse than "hiding" behind a psuedonym? Or is "n2art2" your real name?
As for the better person, I'd say that it's the person who knows the meaning of the words he uses.
Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, Lawrence Lessig...
She didn't put it there.
HP was full of people that wouldn't do the work, extra layers of management, etc. I'm sure that Lew Platt's incredible leadership would have sent the company to new levels of success. Um, no. Remember what day the merger was announced, Sept. 10th, 2001. HP didn't have much of a chance to make good press out of that during the time after 9/11.
Did HP have screw ups? Yep.
Did she have the personality of dog vomit? Yes.
Did the merger ruin the company? Nope.
Most of what she predicted well in advance has come to pass.
Hmm. I wonder where all the smart people are moving ...
they've already hired a few good guys there like Giampaolo(BeOS), Matas, (delicious monster) Hubbard, (freebsd) to name a few...
Well, he'd probalby prefer someone whos "visions" match his own. Not necessarily because he likes being told how good his ideas are, but because he's very often been right, and has much success. You're right, it reduces the pool of candidates, but that's a good thing. Finding a person isn't hard, finding the right person is. Anything that can help you trim away people is a good thing.
I've never met Jobs, so I'm just guessing, but I'd imagine that at times, he's more than willing to entertain other people's ideas and criticisms, it's just that at the end of the day, he's the boss, and once he's made a decision, you need to commit yourself to making that a reality, or else he doesn't want you as an employee. And that doesn't seem like a particularly bad way to run things. But maybe I'm wrong about all this.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Scott McNealy is available!
"she ran a high tech company into the ground "
Make that two companies - Compaq and HP were perfectly good competitors, and what good came of the merger? None. All of Compaq's niche technologies were canned, and Carly's legendary "everything's already been invented, we just have to sell it" speech to the R&D labs pretty much summed up her ability to do her job. The net result of that merger is a massive, inconsistent and confusing product line that I just can't be arsed with - at last look there were about 43 different laser printers!
HP labs pretty much dominated the R&D arena throughout the 90s, and once they lost a huge chunk of the workforce - well, that was the kind of team with experience that gets built over time, and one that you just can't put together again, no matter how much you want to...
That woman does my nut in...
The modern Apple as we know it -- the good one
Good in what sense? Apple is still fairly litigious, they still claim to have invented things they haven't actually invented, and they are still highly proprietary in many areas. They're "good" relative to Microsoft, but I think that's not saying all that much, and there are more than two choices, you know.
Make that two companies
Three. Remember Lucent?
--saint
Yah, but it'd be worth it just to see the look on his face, when you walk up to him with kitchen scissors and tell him to strip so you can collect the proof-of-purchase bits. Especially when you say afterwards, "oh, wait, that's right, they said a Xerox would be acceptable. Hah."
Even SJ, except maybe with SJ. They are all part of something bigger, possibly better, and no matter what there is someone better coming down the pipe next week, year or decade. I'm sure Apple will figure it out, and find better talent than that in command now.
Steve Jobs is a mountain. What I mean is that there is something special about his whole life story and personality that although financially he can't scratch Bill Gates, Jobs is just more interesting. He's been around, done lots of things and whereever he goes, the press will follow. He has his own technical paparatzi (sp.)
When Jobs ran Pixar, the press loved Pixar. They could do no wrong.
When Jobs ran NeXT, making the most overpriced workstation ever, even though noone could afford the machine, the press stayed interested because there had to be something awesome happening there.
When Jobs ran Apple.... well I think that just looking at the positive press he receives is more than enough, I can't do it justice.
I don't know if the term is popular outside of NY where I grew up, but we used a term called "Rain Maker" for the type of executive that could walk into a stubbling company such as Xerox and gain attraction throughout the world. Jobs is quite possibly the greatest "Rain Maker" ever in the corporate history of the world. His presence alone gains so much positive press for any company that he steps foot into that the rest of the people there start feeling more confident and doing better jobs.
I think another factor to point out is that Jobs, although he'll ride a horse until it's dead and then cut the sucker up and serve it for dinner, he has a skill in listening to his subordinates and knowing where to go next. When it comes to managing, along the road I learned a little from one guy and little from another, but the most important thing I ever learned was from Jobs himself. I'll misquote it badly, and I don't remember where I heard it, but here it goes. It was in an interview sometime back when he was starting back at Apple again.
Interviewer : Steve, your success has been phenominal, but how can you be CEO of Pixar and Apple without spreading yourself too thin.
Steve Jobs : It's a challenge of course, but I have a team of people at both Apple and Pixar made up of really bright guys that I trust completely. In reality, these teams run most of each company, but I listen to them and manage them and the rest takes care of itself.
It was something along those lines, but from a business perspective, I've learned a lot from that statement alone. It's really a matter of having a team you trust and being a person that the team trusts as well. You have to all believe that you're there to take care of each other and that everyone is there to take care of you too. If you build a team like that, you'll suceed.
As for what will happen to Apple when Job's is gone, it's hard to speculate, but I'd say there's a very very good chance that whoever comes next would not be able to attract as much positive attention for Apple as Jobs does. In my experience, Mac is just another computer and in most cases the hardware is excellent but the software is a bit clunky. But Steve Jobs can stand on a stage and pitch a product no matter how silly, for example, a new web cam and it'll make headline news on NY Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and pretty much every web site people read the next day. For example, if I recall correctly, Slashdot had the iSight as an article within hours of it happening.
I doubt anyone else could hold the interest in the industry that Jobs does. After all, with the exception of the blue screen presentations by Bill, how many times has he had a web video on the front page of news.com.com.com.com.com
Perhaps Michael Murdock would take the job...
For those who don't recall - he was the ubber-fanboy who offered in a string of emails to take the job as CEO when Steve still had the letter "i" next to it. Later Larry Ellison told him "he could have the job". After a gleeful response from Mike, they sent a follow-up email waving him off and warning him about Apple's campus security.
If they can't be easily persuaded that Jobs Is Right, they are marginalized or chased out.
Nope.
The people who have been most successful working with SJ are those who are quite capable of pushing back. If you're right, and Steve is wrong, you speak up and prove it.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Actually when I opened up one of my Powerbooks, I found what appeared to be a pubic hair, and writing which said 'assembled in mexico', or something like that on the mobo :s
which is totally what she said
If he's not chasing those people out, then my concern is misplaced.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
*ducks*