Apple’s succession crisis is all part of the plan

Apple’s high-level employees keep leaving. While some might consider this a troubling state of affairs, given that the departures of talented people can be both the cause and effect of low morale at a company, CEO Tim Cook isn’t worried, because it’s all part of the plan.

“This is an important part of leadership: thinking about these things and having plans in place,” he said at a wide-ranging all-hands meeting last week. “You know, when people get to a certain age, some are going to retire. This is kind of a natural thing.”

Cook is right to say that time marches inexorably onward. Even the most dedicated employee is eventually going to reach a point when they no longer relish the 9-to-5. (Most journalists hit this point sometime around their 30th birthday.) This explains, to a degree, why chief operating officer Jeff Williams retired in November, and two more senior executives announced their retirements the following month. They’d been doing it for a while, and didn’t want to do it anymore. As Cook says, that’s natural.

Still, it’s not like we’re talking about compulsory retirement on the grounds of age. Retiring is a choice. And even if the fact of retirement is inevitable, the choice people make about when to retire can tell you a lot about their state of mind and what they think about their organization’s future. If people have decided that now is a good time to get out of Dodge, it’s possible they can see a gunfight in the near future. Or an AI battle that Apple is ill-equipped to win.

What’s more, as Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman points out in his coverage of the all-hands meeting, those three retirements were not the only high-profile departures Apple has experienced in the past few months. No mention was made of John Giannandrea, the AI boss who stepped down in December (and will retire in the spring) after Siri failed to make significant progress on his watch. Nor of software design VP Alan Dye, who left the same month to take up a role at Meta. But you know, when people get to a certain age, some are going to work for Mark Zuckerberg. This is kind of a natural thing.

Alan Dye, incidentally, is far from alone in walking away from Apple’s design team. On the hardware side, the company has since 2019 lost Jony Ive, Evans Hankey, Marc Newson, and Abidur Chowdhury, along with numerous less famous but still notable employees.

Tim Cook says the most recent retirements were not surprises; they were, he insists, carefully orchestrated. But it’s tempting to wonder what a company would look like if it were experiencing surprising, unorchestrated churn. And how different that would look from the current situation at Apple, with departments being almost completely replaced within the space of a few years and multiple senior executives grabbing a parachute at the same time.

The tech industry is notorious for its high turnover of personnel and its unwillingness to put up with failure, as we saw with the departure of Giannandrea and may have been the case with Dye, who was linked to the disappointing reception of Liquid Glass. Everyone has a right to retire when they’ve had enough of the long hours and high pressure, or to take a more lucrative position if one is offered. But Cupertino used to be relatively stable. It was a place you moved to, not from. Jony Ive stayed at the company for 27 years because it offered rigorous challenges and a creative environment (plus enough money to buy lots of Aston-Martins). Will we say the same thing about the current batch of Apple employees?

Cook, who has been at the company for 28 years, is understood to be planning his own retirement. But it’s tempting to wonder if that’s had to be pushed back in light of other departures. Is that what he means by orchestration?

Timing your exit can be very important. Four great Australian cricketers retired at the same time in 2007 because they’d won everything there was to win and thrashing England 5-0 at home felt like a good place to stop. But that left a team full of gaps which ended up losing the next three Ashes series. If at all possible you want people to space out their departures. That’s what succession planning is all about. And for all Tim Cook’s positive words, it doesn’t seem like it’s happening at Apple right now.

Welcome to our weekly Apple Breakfast column, which includes all the Apple news you missed last week in a handy bite-sized roundup. We call it Apple Breakfast because we think it goes great with a Monday morning cup of coffee or tea, but it’s cool if you want to give it a read during lunch or dinner hours too.

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