The topic of Steve Jobs’ health has been a concerning one for many in the Apple community, with folks wondering what Apple would be like without Steve Jobs. According to a report from Fortune, Steve Jobs thinks Apple will be just fine.
Fortune’s piece, “Inside Apple,” makes a lot of interesting points and observations But perhaps one of the most interesting is that Steve Jobs believes that Apple will be able to continue on just fine without hum. Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky writes:
Jobs himself believes he has set Apple on a course to survive in his absence. He has created a culture that, while not particularly jolly, has internalized his ways.
He believe that Jobs has been carefully structuring, molding, and “shaping” Apple for years, and has created a system that is designed to work well once he is gone.…
these days, he’s especially focused on institutionalizing his ways of doing business. His mission: to turn the traits that people most closely associate with Jobs–the attention to detail, the secrecy, the constant feedback–into processes that can ensure Apple’s excellence far into the future.
CultofMac’s Leander Kahney writes his own observations for CNN in January:
In the last decade, Jobs has thoroughly remade Apple in his image. His personality traits have become encoded as the way the company does things. His perfectionism, attention to detail, even his design taste, have become part and parcel of Apple’s processes, from product development to advertising.
One of the more intriguing revelations concerns some case studies that are being written about Apple’s most important decisions, such as their iPhone manufacturing in China. Jobs hired Joel Podolny, former dean of Yale School of management, as Apple head of HR. He’s been busy with a team of “eggheads” writing studies about Apple’s business decisions.
It runs out Podolny has been busy working on a project that speaks directly to the delicate topic of life at Apple after Jobs. At Jobs’ instruction, Podolny hired a team of business professors, including the renowned Harvard veteran and Andy Grove biographer Richard Tedlow. This band of eggheads is writing a series of internal case studies about significant decisions in Apple’s recent history. It’s exactly the sort of thing the major business schools do, except Apple’s case studies are for an Apple-only audience… The goal is to expose the next layer of management to the executive team’s thought process… Jobs even is ensuring that his teachings are being collected, curated and preserved so that future generations of Apple’s leaders can consult and interpret them.
Lashinsky’s piece isn’t yet online but is available on the iPad. MacStories has a pretty good summary of it as well.
While I am not looking forward to Steve Jobs departure from Apple (for any reason) in any sense – the loss of such an icon would be a tragedy indeed – I agree that Apple is poised to do extremely well in the wake of this inevitable day to come.
Your thoughts? Sound off in the comments.
Via CultofMac
