BURLINGAME, CALIF. - Pity whoever has to follow Steve Jobs at Apple.
Not every great company stumbles into oblivion after the departure of a visionary founder. The problem: Jobs has left once before, and until he came back, it looked like Apple (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) would be one of those companies.
The question has been rattling around Silicon Valley since Jobs’ appearance at the Apple Developers Conference in June when the Apple chief executive spent relatively short intervals on stage and looked gaunt. An Apple spokeswoman put down his appearance to a “common bug.” But that hasn’t stopped grim speculation by a variety of onlookers.
Whether a leadership transition takes place 12 months from now or two decades from now, picking a Jobs successor is a tricky task. “When you’re dealing with someone who really is a genius, it’s not like you can say, ‘Let’s go find ourselves another genius,’ ” says Patrick Sweeney, executive vice president at Caliper, an organizational consulting firm.
The first time that Jobs tried to share leadership of Apple was a disaster. Pepsi (nyse: PEP - news - people ) President John Sculley, whom Jobs had picked as a mentor, ousted him in 1985–and the company began to crumble. Only when Jobs returned, about a decade later, was Apple able to surge from a computing also-ran to an innovator able to crank out products that shattered the status quo.
Books have been written about why that happened. But here’s one intriguing thread: Sweeney says Jobs is the ultimate “ideational” personality–someone able to find the links between seemingly unrelated ideas fluidly. The result is a company that has transitioned from strength to strength, moving from the Mac, to the iPod, to the iPhone.
The spate of new and appealing products marks Apple as a very different kind of company than others that have found success on different turns. Companies such as McDonald’s (nyse: MCD - news - people ) prosper by listening to what their customers want and marketing their products well. Others, such as Wal-Mart (nyse: WMT - news - people ), thrive by selling products at a better price than the competition. Apple by contrast, is “continually innovative,” Sweeney says.
Putting a manager great at, say, optimizing prices into a company that’s all about new ideas can consequently destroy the competence of both the company and the manager.
Sculley, for example, was the master marketer who devised the “Pepsi Challenge” marketing campaign that helped the beverage company steal market share from rival Coke. Yet Sculley could not create products that Apple customers didn’t know they wanted. Nor did Apple succeed under the sort of sharp-penciled manager able to turn a troubled company into a booming business. Gil Amelio, who cut costs and ground his way to profitability at National Semiconductor (nyse: NSM - news - people ), stumbled too.
Jobs, and Apple, seem to mesh where managers who thrived at very different companies failed. And if Jobs were at a different type of company–one that emphasized cost cutting, for instance–he might not prosper either.
Jobs has much more in common with Zenith founder Eugene F. McDonald Jr. Like Jobs, McDonald was almost synonymous with the company he founded during its golden era. He also pushed the company to build one new product after another–and market them with bold, memorable advertising campaigns– creating a company that prospered through the radio age and into the early years of television, according to Jim Collins’ classic management study “From Good To Great.” When McDonald died in 1958, however, Zenith began a long slide into obscurity.
As a result, Apple will need much more than a skilled manager. “The new person will have to fit that culture like a glove, if that person comes in and tires to change the culture, forget it, it’s over,” Sweeney says. “The passion, the creativity … none of that can change.”
While Apple did not immediately respond to questions about the company’s succession plans, it almost certainly has one. “Anytime that you have a board that is functioning properly, the board should be engaged in a continual review of succession planning for both the CEO and all his or her direct reports,” says Bart Friedman, a partner with Cahill Gordon & Reindel.
Recruiters say most companies will regularly review top talent, tagging employees who could immediately take the job of chief executive in an emergency, as well as those who might be ready for such a role with a few years of seasoning.
Apple rarely speaks about its inner workings with the press. A few stars have moved on, most notably, Jon Rubinstein, who had headed Apple’s iPod business and migrated to Palm (nasdaq: PALM - news - people ) last year.
Even so, Jobs seems to have assembled a smartly functional team. Apple Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook and Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer handle investors and the financial details: appearing before investors and on quarterly conference calls. Cook, a veteran of IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people ) and Compaq, is widely credited with tuning up the grunty details of building everything from Macs to iPods and keeping them on the move, and stepped in to handle business while Jobs was out in 2004 for cancer surgery.
And Jobs has increasingly been splitting stage time with Scott Forstall. The engineer is a Jobs protégé, joining NeXT out of Stanford, and joining Apple with Jobs when the Cupertino, Calif.-based company bought NeXT in 1997.
Apple seems to be bringing along a string of executives who could, if necessary, one day lead the company. “You want to keep that process going all the time,” says Joe Griesedieck, vice chairman and managing director of Korn/Ferry’s CEO Services practice.
Of course, it’s more fun to turn the speculation of ill-health inside out. What if Jobs outlasts his peers? Would he really want to run Apple for another 20 years? And if not, can he be recruited? “He is never going to work for anyone,” Clarke Murphy, managing director and head of chief executive officer practice at Russell Reynolds Associates. “This is an aggressively intellectual visionary, who should be left free with no boundaries.” So be it.
www.forbes.com
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