Among Apple’s existing executives, there are currently two candidates, one is like Jobs and the other is like Cook. Who will be the successor?
Editor’s note: This article is from the micro-channel public number “CSDN” (ID: CSDNnews), Author: Carol.
Recently, Apple’s current CEO Tim Cook said in an interview on April 5 that the current state is not bad and will not step down for the time being, but 10 years are too long and it is impossible to stay 10 year. This means that Cook will step down from Apple’s CEO position within 10 years.
At the same time, on the morning of April 3, Beijing time, Apple also updated its leadership web page, adding John Ternus, senior vice president of hardware engineering.
Apple’s management introduction page: https://www.apple.com.cn/leadership/
The point is that, among Apple’s current executives, both Tenus and the current chief operating officer Jeff Williams (Jeff Williams) are considered popular candidates for the next Apple CEO.
The third and fourth places in the second row are John Tenus and Jeff Williams, respectively
It’s really interesting to talk about these two candidates. One is like Jobs and the other is like Cook.
Tenus joined Apple in 2001 and was appointed as Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering in January this year, leading all hardware engineering, including the teams behind iPhone, iPad, Mac, AirPods, etc. It must be mentioned that he is responsible for the first generation of AirPods and iPad.
At the same time, he is also a key leader in the transition from Mac to Apple chips. The iPhone 12 series and M1 chips were developed by Tenus. Now Tenus is responsible for overseeing the hardware engineering work of various breakthrough products and directly Cook reports.
Although he is not good at operations, his knowledge in hardware is highly valued by Cook. This is similar to Jobs. After all, Jobs was born in hardware, and he also delegated operations to the COO. With his accumulation and current status in the hardware field, Tenus may be the one leading Apple in further innovation. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Tenus became a candidate.
And the other candidate, the currentJeff Williams, Apple’s COO, is considered by the outside world to be a person highly similar to Cook: he also served as Apple’s chief operating officer for a long time, came to Apple in 1998, also has a bachelor’s degree in engineering, and also worked at IBM. , Also studied MBA at Duke University. Bloomberg once commented on Williams: “Williams is a humble, disciplined, and demanding leader. Like Cook, he is a model of operational efficiency and temperament.”
Williams is 58 years old and played a key role in the release of the first iPhone. The classic design of the double-sided glass of the iPhone 4, which subverts the mobile phone industry, is inseparable from the leading participation of Williams. Not only that, he also led the engineering development of Apple Watch, making Apple the world’s largest smart watch manufacturer.
Williams served as the purchasing supervisor at Apple for 13 years and was later promoted to chief operating officer. He even has a wealth of experience in hardware and software design, control, and balance. His excellent supply chain collaboration and operational capabilities have made Cook full of praise, bluntly saying “Williams is the best operations executive I have ever worked with.”
Their similarity is so high that Fortune magazine even commented on Williams in 2011: “Tim Cook’s Tim Cook”.
If Williams takes over as the next Apple CEO, it may be the smoothest transition in Apple’s history.
The difference between Cook and Jobs is that his calm and methodical way of doing things and his attention to social issues have become a symbol of the post-Apple era. At Apple, personality is important, but “stability” is also very important.
Cook was appointed as Apple’s CEO in 2011 and signed a 10-year contract. This year is just entering the 10th year, and Cook is also 61 years old. As Apple pays more and more attention to succession planning, the test for the next generation of successors is not small.
So, who will Apple’s next CEO be? We might as well find some context from Apple’s previous CEO.
The Jobs Era
Jobs was one of the founders of Apple, but his time as CEO of Apple was divided into two periods: April 1, 1976 to September 17, 1985 and 1997 to August 2011.
In 1976, 21-year-old Jobs founded Apple with Steve Wozniak and Rowe Wayne, and then assembled 200 Apple Ⅰ computers with Wozniak, but at that time Apple was the only company The big order is for a local computer store for 50 Apple I, each for $500. In the second year, Apple launched the Apple Ⅱ, priced at $1,298. This was the first personal computer and the first computer equipped with a mono output architecture. Since then, the computer has realized sound.
It is this Apple Ⅱ opened up many firsts in the history of microcomputers, defeated all computers in one fell swoop, and made Apple stand out from the crowd. Apple Ⅱ was first released in 1977 to stop sales on November 15, 1993. It has been on the market for more than 16 years and shipped 5 million units. The span of time is beyond imagination.
The launch of Apple Ⅱ was an important turning point for Apple. After three years of rapid development, it went on the market in 1980. Overnight Apple gave birth to 4 billionaires and more than 40 millionaires.
But in 1985, Apple, which had just gotten on the right track, revoked Jobs’ management rights due to internal differences and drove Jobs out of Apple. The reason is that Apple’s board of directors believes that Jobs bet on Apple’s entire profit to develop new products without considering the maintenance of Apple Ⅱ’s marketing. The behavior of arbitrarily engaging in Lisa machines is intolerable, but Jobs firmly believes that the new product Lisa will have a huge impact in the multimedia field. Prospects. In addition, IBM also entered the personal computer market at that time, Apple’s sales were affected, and Apple’s internal disagreements were further accelerated. In the end, the 30-year-old father of Apple left the company he himself founded.
Jobs, who left Apple, founded Pixar Animation Studios. In 1995, he launched the world’s first all-dimensional 3D animation film “Toy Story”, and Jobs’s value soared to 1 billion yuan.
But on the other hand, Apple has fallen to the bottom. This group of elites who maintain the ideas of the industrial age can’t seem to find a new breakthrough. Apple, which has lost the “father of Apple”, has not made a major breakthrough for 11 years. . In 1996, Apple employees realized how important Jobs was to Apple, so in November 1997, Jobs was welcomed back to the company he founded. He led the NeXTSTEP operating system to return to Apple and took over as CEO. Apple introduced IMac in 1998, and iTunes and iPod in 2001. In 2007, iPhone2G was launched, and iPhone3G/3GS and 4G/4S were launched successively year by year. Both the App Store and the birth of Siri have had a profound impact on the mobile phone industry.
Apple in the Steve Jobs era brought about subversion and “revolution.” When the mobile phones all over the world are stuck in keyboard thinking, the iPhone pioneered a keyboardless mobile phone. And since the iPhone generation, the pattern of the entire iPhone series has been laid down, and the entire mobile phone industry has also been reshaped.
On October 5, 2011, Jobs died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 56. This legendary star fell, but Apple did not.
The Cook Age
If Jobs is pursuing disruptive innovation, then Cook should be pursuing continuous innovation.
Jobs’s harshness on the product, Let “Jobs produce must be fine”, and Cook is more on the continuous innovation and marketing under Jobs’ productism philosophy.
If you go back to the 1990s, you will find that Cook is as important to Apple as Jobs.
In 1998, Cook joined Apple, shortly after Jobs returned. As mentioned above, before Jobs came back, Apple had gone through a long process of no innovation for more than ten years. In fiscal 1997, Apple lost more than $1 billion, and most of the losses were in the supply chain and operations.
Cook came to Apple at this critical moment, and it can be said that he has made a difference in his own power. In September 1998, Apple’s inventory was reduced by six days, and at the end of 1999, it was reduced to two days.
In 1997, it was 31 days. In other words, Apple’s goods have to be held in the warehouse for an average of one month. For digital products, this underweight is fatal.
To this day, some people still ridicule like this: Jobs is a genius, and Cook is just a businessman. This businessman is only responsible for one thing, which is to get the factory to quickly produce the finished product, and then quickly send it to the consumer.
But the truth behind this ridicule is: McDonald’s inventory turnover rate is 2.5 days, and Apple, which has thousands of spare parts, only needs 5 days.
Cook’s innovation and improvement in Apple’s supply chain not only allowed Apple’s industry chain to take the lead, but also allowed IT companies all over the world to benefit from the rapid changes in the supply chain. Otherwise, with the current sales of Apple products, the fluctuations from the production side may be dozens of times larger than it is now. If all of Jobs’ ideas beyond the times are not converted into actual production capacity, how many “genius ideas” will be obliterated?
If it hadn’t been for Cook’s back then, maybe even the iPod hadn’t even been released, and Apple would have lost it. The first generation of the iPhone has been intensively developed in 2004, but since 2004, Jobs has also been sick and hospitalized. During this period, it was Cook who replaced Jobs in managing Apple.
In other words, for the iPhone generation, what Jobs knows, and Cook knows it. Cook may have gradually been in charge of Apple’s operations since 2004. Whether it is iPhone4 and 4S, or iPod, MacBook, iPad, Cook has not been absent.
If Steve Jobs is a champion, then Cook is the one who guards the country. As the old saying goes, it is easy to fight the country, but it is difficult to keep the country.
Compared to Jobs, Cook is more inclined to upgrade the product. The iPhone 5s screen is expanded to 4 inches, and the A7 processor is used. The resolution is upgraded from the original 960×640 to 1136×640; the iPhone 6 screen is expanded again , To 4.7 inches, distinguishThe rate is 1334*750 pixels, A8 processor; the biggest difference between iPad 4 and iPad 3 is the use of facetimeHD high-definition camera and processor upgrade…
Cook has been maintaining a new product every year, and each generation is optimizing. In 2018, Apple’s market value exceeded $1 trillion. In 2020, Apple developed the M1 chip, which also attracted attention from the industry.
Cook has been in charge of Apple for 10 years, making Apple’s operations more systematic, more transparent, more focused on teamwork, and more humble. Including under his control, while maintaining high profit margins while deepening into the Chinese market, Apple’s number of offline stores in the Chinese market has surged. In addition, he has also led Apple to vigorously enter the corporate market, through such as iTunes, iCloud and Apple Pay. The service helps the company to obtain more additional profits from the equipment that has already been sold.
At this time, let’s look back at Cook’s resume: In 1988, Cook received a master’s degree in business management from Duke University, and later worked more towards supply chain/logistics management; in 1998, 38 years old Cook joined Apple at the invitation of Jobs, and worked with Jobs for more than ten years to increase the value of Apple to unprecedented heights; from 2002 to 2005, he was responsible for operations, sales, and manufacturing; in 2005, he was appointed COO of Apple; in 2011, he was promoted to CEO of Apple.
Jobs may be a god, but Cook is not a mediocre man.
What capabilities does Apple’s next CEO need?
Nowadays, there are still many voices from the outside world saying that “Apple is eating its roots.” However, for Apple, for so many years, it cannot only “subvert” this matter. Based on realistic considerations and based on the market’s catch-up, Apple is now It is still the world’s largest technology company by market value.
On the 45th anniversary of Apple’s founding, Cook wrote in memory of Steve Jobs: “Although Apple has undergone many changes over the years, the most important things have not changed. From the M1 chip to the 5G iPhone, from changing education and productivity. From the face of the iPad, to the smartwatch that can detect your health, and to the best software and services that they have become indispensable, we have never stopped setting the pace that others try to catch up.”
At the time, Jobs’s heart was the chief designer Jony Ive, and he was also the most popular for succession, but in the end Jobs chose Cook as his successor. At that time, many people speculated that this was aesthetically and commercial. Compromise, or take a fancy to its outstanding achievements, calm and reliable?
In the book “The Biography of Tim Cook”, he mentioned the reason why Jobs chose Cook to take over. You can also get a glimpse of what Apple’s next CEO looks like. Cook has the expertise and ability to ensure the smooth development of Apple. Good at grasping the key personal characteristics of the problem, and also very good at providingApplication chain management and the establishment of Apple’s foundry strategy have enabled Apple to revive.
Now that Apple’s supply chain management is quite mature, the next CEO does not need to worry as much as when Cook first came. In other words, for the current Apple, the foundation is already very solid, so the next successor must have the ability to dig deeper into the existing moat, and how to lead Apple to accelerate the pace of innovation is also very important.
What do you think of Cook leaving office within 10 years? What do you think Apple’s CEO needs most?