Thursday, November 17, 2011

A Bite of the Boston Globe Apple

Found a Job:

"After Jobs, questions about Apple’s future" October 07, 2011|By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff

For Apple to thrive without Jobs, it must adopt a more open, less hierarchical management style, said James Post, a professor at the Boston University School of Management. Post criticized the notorious Jobs penchant for secrecy, which for years kept investors largely in the dark about the Apple chief executive’s health and the company’s succession plans. The Apple board of directors should have challenged Jobs’s actions, but rarely did, according to Post.

“There was really pretty poor corporate governance,’’ he said. “There was a board that was dominated pretty much by him.’’

Word on the blogs is that Jobs wasn't very cooperative when it came to installing spying software and other such programs.  

Jobs isn’t the first legendary corporate leader to leave behind nagging doubts about his successors. Similar questions arose after the deaths of McDonald’s Corp. founder Ray Kroc, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. founder Sam Walton, and other executives that seemed inseparable from the businesses they led. Some of those companies, like Wal-Mart and McDonald’s, continued to thrive beyond the tenure of their famous leaders, while others faltered.

Apple has already experienced life without Jobs. Kicked out of Apple in 1985, Jobs was recruited back to save the company in 1997. Not only did Jobs return, but his rescue turned him from goat to hero. It was then that he began the winning streak of iconic products that transformed Apple into a $350 billion consumer electronics behemoth....

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