There is something related to the future of Apple I’ve been thinking about for some time. Perhaps the recent Jony Ive promotion is a good opportunity to talk about it.
I’m firm in my conviction Apple is building a company to last 100 plus years. Someone once said Steve Jobs’ greatest legacy is not any single Apple product but Apple itself. Apple is actually a product, although many don’t view it this way. Apple is unique in many regards from every other tech company. The people, culture, process, priorities, etc., are unique to Apple. These are all elements many management schools and books will outline as core and emphasize as required for healthy and continually successful companies to thrive. The hard part for many companies is to make these core company traits proprietary. This is something Apple has done extremely well.
This is why I believe many notable execs who leave Apple, having accomplished a great deal at Apple, find it hard to have similar success at other companies. Tony Fadell and Ron Johnson are just a couple who come to mind. The reason I believe is because the secret sauce at Apple plays a huge role in the success of many of these individuals. A sports parallel comes to mind. If you follow sports, and in particular any sports team, you realize star players are sometimes stars for reasons outside of their talent. Certainly, talent plays a role but so does the stadium, dynamics of a particular division, opposing competition, coaching staff, and locker room/team camaraderie can and do play a role in a player’s success. This is why you sometimes see very talented athletes sign with a new team and don’t find the same success in another organization and location. Similarly, a player who may struggle to reach their potential on one team will get traded or sign with a new team only to find a great deal of success. My point is, there are more variables at play than just pure talent in the success or failures of many individuals both in the sports and the business world.
I bring this up to underscore a point. Apple is unique. The culture, the people, the dynamic, the process, all unique to the company. Again, thinking about Apple itself as a product, a key long term question remains. Can Apple continue to be Apple in 20, 30, 50, or 100 years? And how will Apple accomplish this when the current management and leadership is no longer there? If Apple is the true product of Steve Jobs’ legacy, then ensuring it lives well beyond not just its founder but also many generations of leadership should also be top of mind.
Perhaps this is what we are witnessing in Jony Ive’s transition. It is certainly one spotlight I personally have as an analyst as I think about where Apple will be in 50 years. While Jony is obviously not leaving the company, it seems he, and I assume many others at Apple, are thinking about how to home grow future leaders of Apple who can keep the product intact for many generations to come. This is the result of a many year process to identify, train, and transition leadership roles to those who are the future of Apple. This is the true test for the company. Tim Cook will need a successor, as will Phil Schiller, and certainly Jony. Obviously in 50 years, Apple will be filled with fresh faces looking to make the world’s best products for the global consumer audience. How this happens, and is the process duplicatable for future leaders is a key question I’ll continue to be fascinated by.
I’d recommend a healthy dose of looking back.
With the benefit of age, I think I’m at my 5th batch of can-do-no-wrongs. There’s been GE, GM, IBM, MS, Coke, Toyota… I think even Sony made the list at some point in time. With luck I’ll still be around for the next batch.
Common issues when crowning those have been what we French call belly-button-ism (“they’re important/good to me, so they’re important/good period), confusing context (being in a growing, evolving market) with intrinsic qualities, overlooking issues (60% of revenue from a single product in a fashion market mostly driven by subsidies maybe, in the present case), and forgetting organizations’ tendency to replace visionaries with optimizers then with politicians.
Oh believe me, being related to one of the foremost tech industry historians who not just observed the industry since the early 80’s but lived it with many of those companies, I will never be able to not look back. 🙂
I’m not insinuating Apple will be dominant in 50 years, only that they are trying to build a company to last that long. IBM’s 100 year reign is a great case study with some early day parallels but key being I’m, and even Tim has said this before, we are yet to come across a company like this. But that is now and then, the question remains into the future. Hence why I said, that tantamount to Apple successfully being around and relevant in 50 years is to continually bring up new leaders through their farm system. No guarantee for sure, but this transition to study the soil not the seed is a key part. That was my point.
In an industry that is in constant motion, disrupts and is disrupted, your ability to keep tech history in balance with tech present to project potential tech futures is one of the things I admire about this site and your work as presented here. Not many tech sites have such a direct historic perspective as Techpinions. It is easy to forget or not even realize that from a reader perspective.
Joe
As Horace Dediu likes to note, the average life expectancy of a S&P 500 company is now less than 30 years. Other people have noticed this and they are researching what is unique about the companies that last for a long time, sometimes over a century.
It is obvious that for a company to survive for over a century, it has to be capable of living longer much than the products that it produces. It is absurd to expect that smartphones will be around in their current form 100 years from now, for example.
In fact, there is one company in the tech industry that was founded 150 years ago in 1865. That company is Nokia. It was first a pulp company, then moved to rubber, electricity generation, electronics, and then telecommunications. What is extremely interesting about Nokia is that when faced with its rapidly shrinking handset business, it chose to jettison it and become a much smaller company. In that move, I think I saw was the survival instincts of a company that has lived for 150 years. That is to say, I felt that Nokia had an identity that was separate from its expertise in telecommunications or its glory in handsets. It had an identity that was independent of its capabilities or products, and that was much more precious than its past glories. Sticking to this identity was probably what has allowed Nokia to survive for so long, despite the ups and downs of their business. And sticking to this identity was what allowed them to confidently jettison their ailing handset business.
If Apple is to be similar, it probably has to cultivate an identity and value system that is totally independent of its most successful products and even independent of its strengths in computer hardware and software. Apple will one day surely find its handset business in decline and its profits challenged. If Apple is to live more than a century, it will probably need the courage to let that business go, but still maintain the company identity.
Contrast this with what happened to the “HP Way”. HP trashed their identity and prioritised their PC business. As a result, HP lost their identity but managed to keep the company large. Nokia on the other hand did the opposite thing.
I like the idea of Jony Ive’s transition and I even like the idea of his designing furniture and stuff for the new campus. I think that one thing Apple is trying to do is to institutionalise it’s identity independently from its tech products, and Ive is playing a large role in this.
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