Matthew Lynn is a financial columnist and author. He writes for the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator in London.
He never had the mystique, the vision or the black turtlenecks. Even after 15 years running Apple, CEO Tim Cook remains in the shadow of Steve Jobs, the company’s brilliant co-founder. Cook was Ringo to Jobs’s John or Paul. But with his last day as Apple CEO on Monday, he is due for a reassessment. In reality, Cook was the real genius at Apple. And as the years go by, that will become even more evident.
Cook won’t completely leave Apple on Tuesday. But he will move upstairs, becoming executive chairman, and John Ternus will become the company’s chief executive. It is a measure of Cook’s achievements that the transition is a nonevent. When Cook took over after Jobs resigned, some analysts worried the business would struggle without its founding genius. Indeed, Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle, argued it would never be the same again. But this time around? A collective shrug. The market simply assumes Apple will carry on churning out billions in profits every quarter.
Yet, to most observers, Jobs will always be the hero of the Apple story. A maverick, ousted from his own company, who returned in triumph: His narrative always felt almost Homeric. Cook, by contrast, is the dull numbers guy. Sure, he has streamlined the Apple machine. But he simply sells the products that Jobs invented. He hasn’t launched much that is new. Indeed, exciting products, such as the long-rumored Apple car, were eventually dropped. He never changed the technology industry the way that Jobs did, not just once but several times.
However, perhaps the conventional wisdom has got this all wrong. Apple’s market value increased tenfold over Cook’s time in charge, and its revenue and profits quadrupled. He transformed the company into a colossus of global capitalism.
Think that was easy? Industrial history is littered with companies that flourished as a new technology emerged and then faded after their founder left. Douglas Aircraft practically created the modern aerospace industry, launching models such as the DC-3 and the DC-8. But after Donald Douglas stepped back from the day-to-day running of the business in 1957, the company went into steady decline. It was absorbed by Boeing in 1997. Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid, has been described as the Steve Jobs of the 1960s and 1970s, but after he left the company in 1982, his successors messed up the business so badly that the company had to declare Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2001. Ken Olsen made Digital Equipment the second-largest computing company in the world in the 1980s, behind only IBM at its peak, but who remembers it today? There are lots of brilliant entrepreneurs, but just a handful of their businesses turn into enduring giants.
Had its leadership been different, Apple could have become a logo that Lenovo slapped onto the side of a cheap laptop; or a subunit of Google’s mobile phone group; or a niche find at thrift stores. Fortunately for its shareholders and millions of loyal customers, Apple under Cook has grown to become the second-largest company in the world. That was not an easy trick to pull off.
As a corporation’s leadership transitions from its founder to professional managers, it needs to replace a visionary’s instincts with replicable business systems that can be passed from one set of managers to the next. And it needs to find a way to incrementally improve products to retain customers even when it no longer has the genius to create completely new ones. Few companies actually pull it off. None of the original members of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, created in 1896, still make the list.
Apple, however, is among the enduring giants of American business. It will probably still be around in 100 years, and perhaps even in 200. That was not a given 15 years ago. That is Cook’s achievement, and it is far greater than anything Jobs accomplished in his lifetime. Perhaps as Cook takes his job as executive chairman, he should be given something more valuable than a gold watch: the recognition he deserves.
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