“The man at the helm of Apple for the next six months while CEO Steve Jobs is on leave is an exacting executive who shares his boss’ perfectionism and obsession with detail,” Adam Lashinsky reports for Fortune.
“Tim Cook, Apple’s chief operating officer, has run Apple before: four years ago when Jobs underwent surgery for pancreatic cancer. Only this time, the 48-year-old Cook’s stint running the company may end up being the ultimate job tryout. If Jobs’ health does not improve, Cook certainly seems a leading candidate to run the Cupertino, Calif.-based computer and device maker,” Lashinsky reports. “But… Cook doesn’t see himself as Jobs’ replacement.”
“‘Come on, replace Steve? No. He’s irreplaceable,’ Cook said recently, according to a person who knows him well. ‘That’s something people have to get over. I see Steve there with gray hair in his 70s, long after I’m retired,'” Lashinsky reports.
“In interviews with two dozen people who have dealt directly with Cook, a picture emerges that is reassuring if unanticipated. It turns out that although Cook and Jobs are in many ways opposites, the No. 2 exec is equally obsessive and exacting about his work,” Lashinsky reports.
The extensive full article is here.
Two words: Al Gore.
Bring in Apple board member Al Gore to run Apple.
Experience as VP, internet background, environmentalist, democrat, Nobel Prize and probably owns Apple products.
Al Gore.
Mac OS LockBox
God, don’t do that to me, I’d have to go back to Windows.
I’m glad to see someone from my home state doing something really awesome.
Tim Cook: the power behind the throne, and now putting the ‘interim’ back into iCEO
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Someday? Operationally, he has been running Apple. So of course he can “run” Apple. And Apple will continue to retain and attract the creative people who design great products. But if Tim Cook ever becomes permanent CEO of Apple, he has to be the final word on the products and business strategies; Apple after the return of Steve Jobs is great because it is focused on key markets. He does not need to conceive those products and strategies, but he does need to be the single decision maker. A company like Apple cannot be lead by committee or within separate “silos.”
If Apple ever devolves back into the still creative but scatter-brained Apple of the early 1990’s, trying to do too many things at the same time because the money was there, Apple will slowly become irrelevant, again. I think Tim Cook, like Steve Jobs, is a perfectionist, so he won’t let that happen. If he does become CEO, he’ll just approach the task from a different direction.
Steve is fine, all this rumors and “health absence” is just part of a plan to find the next CEO so Steve jobs can live a normal live. Apple didn’t know that Steve’s health rumors could cause so much damage to the company, so they came out with this plan to make people star focusing on Apple and not on Steve.