Business Week is reporting so.
Cook was well-groomed for the succession. He had run manufacturing, logistics, customer support, and sales for years and had stepped in three times as interim chief executive officer during Jobs’s medical leaves. Colleagues say the Alabama-bred Cook has a frank style and a detailed knowledge of even minute operational details. Unlike Jobs, he prefers to withhold his opinion until the end of meetings, so others can give him information to process. “His leadership style is quite different, both internally and externally. He’s much more open,” says Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein in New York. “I think he believes he doesn’t have all the answers, so he’s willing to listen to other people. I’m not so sure that was the case with Steve.”
After Jobs died, observers wondered whether Cook could retain his accomplished management team—most of whom are fabulously wealthy and likely exhausted from years of tireless work. Cook has managed to keep everyone, but it hasn’t come cheaply. Last November, he handed out an additional round of stock options, now worth about $100 million, to his senior team. Cook never professed to be a genius at envisioning products or crafting marketing campaigns, so he’s leaned heavily on longtime colleagues such as Scott Forstall, senior vice president of iOS Software, Jony Ive, senior vice president of industrial design, and Phil Schiller, senior vice president of worldwide product marketing. Cook’s deference to his colleagues was on display at the iPhone 5 launch event. Apple’s CEO spoke for only 11 minutes of the nearly two-hour event and then ceded the stage to a succession of his subordinates.
Earlier this summer, Cook actually did lose a key member of his team—and then nearly witnessed an insurrection in one of Apple’s most prominent divisions. On June 28, Apple announced the retirement of Senior Vice President Bob Mansfield, who for over a decade oversaw the remarkable expansion of the Macintosh line before taking on the iPhone and iPad as well. According to three people familiar with the sequence of events, several senior engineers on Mansfield’s team vociferously complained to Cook about reporting to his replacement, Dan Riccio, who they felt was unprepared for the magnitude of the role. In response, Cook approached Mansfield and offered him an exorbitant package of cash and stock worth around $2 million a month to stay on at Apple as an adviser and help manage the hardware engineering team.
On Aug. 27 the company took the rare step of announcing that Mansfield would stay at Apple. Jobs had hired and fired several outside managers, including Mark Papermaster, an operations executive from IBM (IBM) who later went to Cisco (CSCO). But this kind of public reversal was new to Apple. “Because of its size and a few key personalities, there’s more organizational infighting than is healthy,” says Brett Halle, a 21-year Apple veteran who left earlier this year. “It needs to be brought into check.”
Outside the company, the embarrassment over its map app has prompted the unavoidable question: Would it have happened under Steve? It’s possible that Jobs would have nixed the app before launch, but that’s not certain. Siri, the iPhone’s hapless voice assistant, was introduced under Jobs, though it was branded beta. Apple insiders say Jobs himself initiated the mapping project, putting mobile software chief Forstall in charge, and he installed a secret team on the third floor of Building 2 on Apple’s campus to replace Google Maps on the iPhone. At the time of his death, Jobs had come to loathe Google, which he felt was copying features of the iPhone while withholding a key feature of Google Maps that allows smartphones to dictate turn-by-turn directions aloud. Jobs also discussed pulling Google search from the iPhone, but figured that customers would reject that move, according to two former Apple executives.
Despite the overwhelmingly negative response to Maps, analysts acknowledge that the company was boxed in because maps and navigation have become such an important source of customer data and potential revenue on mobile devices. “I don’t think Apple had any choice but to make a major break and say: We are going to just start from the beginning,” says Tim Bajarin, an analyst with Creative Strategies. “The best thing Apple could do was take the hit now.”
Tim Cook is a clever man if this is true then i would expect Bob is worth the spend.
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