“Every year, we profile companies in the top and bottom ranks that we haven’t written about previously to provide a fresh set of management insights,” Drew Morris and Michael Burdi report for Chief Executive Magazine.
“The write-ups reflect company events and performance up until June 30, 2011. Therefore, incidents such as Steve Jobs stepping down as Apple’s CEO and News Corp.’s hacking scandal were not included,” Morris and Burdi report. “There’s always the question of whether a CEO who produces blockbuster results is good or just lucky. The three profiled wealth creators are good, without question. And they all seemed to have a secret sauce¬—what we’ll call a prosperity design: highly specific and thought-through ways that they harnessed to create uncommon success. For the wealth destroyers, the plan seemed mainly to be, ‘Let’s buy another company.'”
Apple CEO Steve Jobs, Rank #5: It’s unavoidable. Despite the “dependence-on-Steve-Jobs” risk element in our scoring methodology, Apple still blew the doors off in terms of wealth creation. And there is a lot to admire—in the main, intent and ability. Apple is all about creating “hit records” — blockbuster products and services, on purpose. They want to. They’re serious. They’re good at it. Because they’ve built the ability to create hit records, from perceiving nascent/obvious-in-retrospect market needs through designing and delivering products and services matched to those needs, and that excite. They have, well, flair. Apple’s success is built on design: of their offerings, of the businesses they’re in (the iTunes and app-store ecosystems) and of the way they shape, hone and control the offerings that get out the door—thus managing their brand. There’s little question that Steve Jobs is a unique talent. And one of the ways in which he’s applied that talent is creating an organization design that may well be able to replicate Apple’s performance to date even now that he’s no longer at its creative heart, or wooing its fans.
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “AtlAndrew” for the heads up.]