1) Announce a Management Succession Plan
How hard is this, really? Apple has plenty of competent managers. All the board has to do is announce what the management hierarchy would look like if Jobs left the company for personal reasons. With that knowledge in hand, he can stay as long as he wants as far as I’m concerned! The board knows this is a crucial issue (the stock plummets each time the health issue appears troubling), but simply ignores it for some reason.
Personally, I do not believe that a Jobs-less Apple would be in trouble. The idea that he is the entire brains behind the company and its products, and not the other 35,000 employees is pretty silly. Jobs is certainly a very good CEO, but the idea that Apple lacks the talent to innovate without him seems far fetched to me.
2) Announce a Stock Buyback Plan and Repurchase 20% of the Company
At current prices they could retire 20% of the company’s outstanding shares and still have $12 billion of cash in the bank (and that number would grow every quarter from there). Can anyone really make the argument that Apple needs more than $10 billion of cash? I guess if you think they are going to buy Dell for cash or something than you could, but large tech acquisitions rarely are successful and more importantly, Apple has no history of even attempting them. A large buyback would be significantly accretive to earnings per share and could get the stock rolling again after the latest Jobs-related hiccups.
Neither of these moves would hamper the future outlook for Apple whatsoever. They would simply show that the board of directors is actually doing their job; working for the shareholders of the company.
Full article here.
