The Designer as CEO: An open letter to Apple’s Board
Dear Apple Directors,
You are one of the most successful boards in corporate America. Apple stock is continually climbing. The company is admired on Wall Street and in countless boardrooms for its product portfolio and high margins. The business model and dominant marketshare of the iPod ecosystem transformed the entertainment industry, first with music and now with television and the movie business. The iPhone launch was a watershed, where a gadget achieved celebrity with the masses, and outsold all other smartphones combined during its launch window. Apple is regarded by many as the global standard for innovation, racking up more valuable intellectual property in a year than many companies have generated in their entire existence.
Congratulations on this success, success which revolves around one man – Steve Jobs. Iconoclastic, dynamic, phenomenal Steve Jobs: the man with a golden talent for picking winners. He’s the guy that makes being on Apple’s Board of Directors cool. And one day, he’s going to leave. Whether he moves to Disney, or retires, or stays on like Warren Buffett, one day he’ll be gone. When a company is so singularly identified with one individual, it’s difficult to consider life after Steve. But as the Board, it’s part of your fiduciary duty to develop a succession plan – not only to manage the risk of the Gulfstream going down, but to manage the certainty that one day Apple will need a new CEO.
Now, you know this already, far more than I do. You’ve already got succession planning happening. So enough of the small talk: Jonathan Ive should be Apple’s next CEO.
It’s not that there’s no talent in the C-suites at Apple. But those people are well-oiled parts of the Steve-machine. They do their work to enable Jobs to do his. They’re amazing catalysts for Steve’s chemistry, and because of this they will never have the independent vision to provide continued market leadership.
You might argue that Jonathan Ive is no different. But that’s not true: he’s a designer who taps into the wells of unmet consumer need that fuel Apple’s ongoing growth. With the exception of Steve himself, he’s tuned to the zeitgeist that determines winners more than anyone else at Apple. Moreover, he’s able to articulate that vision with consistent grace and precise execution. He’s got a track record of hitting home runs. If you want to keep the innovation leadership that makes Apple, well, Apple, then you’ve got to have the driver’s seat firmly bolted to the flow of trend, meaning, and consequence. That’s the domain of Design, and Jonathan Ive is your Designer.
Not that he’s perfect – he’ll need coaching to round out his business fluency. He’ll need a strong team of C-level support – with more peers than minions. But I think that’s even better. Trading one iconoclast for another doesn’t help the company mature, and building a team dedicated to vision, innovation, and execution does the company more good than trying to create Steve 2.0. Putting together a team that can successfully carry the Apple banner in a post-Steve world is no trivial thing. In Apple’s case, the cultural DNA demands that this leadership team needs to be led by design more than any other strategic competency (remember Scully?). Everyone in the executive team needs to get design, and design thinking. Jonathan Ive can make this gel. Using Design leadership to distribute the Apple magic among the team is a better strategy than trying to put it all on the new CEO’s shoulders. Otherwise, the stock price should dip every time that Gulfstream leaves the runway.
Now, of course, Jonathan Ive shuns the limelight. He may not turn out to be the consummate sales guy that you need to sell dreams to the switchers of tomorrow, or keep the Apple legions loyal. If he can’t step up to that, you may need to look elsewhere. But whoever you choose, please make sure they are a designer at heart, if not in training. Your investors and the Apple faithful will thank you.
Sincerely,
Jess McMullin
p.s. Design is not just style.
September 14th, 2007 at 9:33 pm
On the other hand, Ives could have designed ten clunkers and Steve demanded the changes that turned the design around. We just don’t know. I do agree that the successor needs to have a highly refined design ethic though.
September 15th, 2007 at 4:49 am
Your idea is a wee bit fanciful. Surely the CEO requirement is for a world class marketeer who has excellent design understanding. The ability to recognise what features will be attractive to the market segment being aimed at and to ensure it is pared down to achieve tremendous ease of use. The Jobs/Ives combination has worked extremely well and I doubt you can find all of their combined talents in just one person.
Look at the Wii versus its competition - pared down but meets a big market segment which Sony/MS didn’t look at. Didn’t require a designer to lead Nintendo, did it?
September 15th, 2007 at 7:13 am
I totally agree. Jobs has a high mind for design, only because he knows what he wants. Jonathan has been the one since Apple’s revival to place the designs in front of him for his approval or rejection. But when you look at Jobs, he has no formal training in anything, other than maybe caligraphy. He is a rare breed that knows what he wants, and drives the vision to the others around him. Jonathan has the design mind and has seen Jobs in action now for 10 years. He knows how it is done. The only question is whether he has the personality to make it work. He seems a bit laid-back. But I think he is the clear front runner.
September 15th, 2007 at 10:30 am
Of course it’s fanciful - it’s an open letter to Apple’s Board :)
But it’s interesting….and I’m enjoying the conversations here and elsewhere about how much the CEO needs to be a designer, and how literally that holds for a design-led company like Apple.
Also worth reading Bruce Nussbaum’s CEO as Designer post at Business Week which got me thinking about taking that idea to its far extremes (thus the Designer as CEO).
http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/NussbaumOnDesign/archives/2007/06/ceos_must_be_de.html
Also worth looking at Victor Lombardi’s “Can We Run the Company” deck talking about business leadership and designers….
http://www.victorlombardi.com/presentations/UPA_Run-The-Company.pdf
September 15th, 2007 at 1:31 pm
Just because you’re good at being a head designer, lead designer, whatever does not equate that you’d make a good CEO.
September 16th, 2007 at 1:39 am
I am not convinced.
Jonathan Ive has demonstrated excellence in designing forms for Apple producuts, and he certainly has style.
But has he been responsible for designing functions, i.e., how things work? This is just as important for Apple’s success. Design is not just how things look.
He does not seem to have sufficient experience managing a technology company, its whole operation.
September 16th, 2007 at 7:53 am
I like Eric Schmidt, Google CEO and current Apple Board member. But I hope we have Steve for years ro come. I’m holding my AAPL stock until Macs achieve 20% US market share, at least.
September 24th, 2007 at 9:27 pm
Nope, Steve Jobs shows no signs of retiring any time soon, but Jess McMullin, who runs the great Business plus Design blog, thinks ahead and preemptively wraps his head around Apple’s succession planning. In an open letter to the Apple board, he urges the directors to consider Jonathan Ive, Apple’s SVP of Industrial Design, as Jobs’ successor, if need be. (Mullin was obviously inspired by Bruce Nussbaum’s “CEOs Must Be Designers, Not Just Hire Them” post several months ago.)
And yet — a designer as CEO? (wearing the marketing hat for a renowned design consultancy, I am posing this question as innocently as I can without getting harassed by my creative colleagues…..)
Read more
http://www.cnet.com/8301-13641_1-9783531-44.html
September 25th, 2007 at 9:23 pm
At least whoever they one day get to replace Jobs will be less of a total prick than he is. That’s a given.
September 26th, 2007 at 6:24 am
“Surely the CEO requirement is for a world class marketeer who has excellent design understanding.”
Oh. Surely. Because we all know that the only people able to run a business have marketing backgrounds… like former CEO John Sculley.
“The ability to recognise what features will be attractive to the market segment being aimed at and to ensure it is pared down to achieve tremendous ease of use.”
Quick. Someone tell Microsoft that Bill Gates isn’t qualified. And while you’re at it, tell investors in Google that marketers aren’t running the show. Oh, the humanity! Their stock will doubtlessly plummet the minute word gets out.
“Look at the Wii versus its competition - pared down but meets a big market segment which Sony/MS didn’t look at.”
Omigod. What amazing 20/20 hindsight. Is it possible that neither Sony nor MS have *any* marketing people on staff? I mean, how did they (and almost the entire game industry… most of whom laughed at Nintendo’s efforts prior to their sales success) not realize that they were doing it allllll wrong. They must be staffed with only engineers, designers and a few hamstrung salespeople. Why won’t they hire any marketing people? Curious minds want to know.
“Didn’t require a designer to lead Nintendo, did it?”
Didn’t require a marketer either; because you obviously don’t know, Nintendo’s CEO, Satoru Iwata, is a dyed-in-the-wool computer scientist who also, reportedly, contributes concept art. So your point would be…?
September 28th, 2007 at 9:34 pm
I for one believe that the multi-disciplinary designer mindset makes a good path to the CEO chair, but the question comes down to the individual that is Jonathan Ive.
Currently this post does take a leap of faith on some assumptions on the relationship between Ive and Jobs as well as the Apple design process. A process that we actually know very little about as Mr Ive is very PR shy. Fortunately we do know that Jobs talks to Ive a lot.
But ultimately this discussion comes down to the characteristics of great CEOs of which one is Vision. For sure Ive does what more designers should do and that is “Strategy Visualization”, but the question is that does he have the vision and strategic thinking skills that Steve Jobs has? If he does then he will make a great Apple CEO, but from the rumors of the “Iron Fist” management style (not necessary bad) that Steve Jobs runs Apple, I’m not so sure.
What we see today in Apple’s product repertoire could be a result of a very tight brief originating from Steve’s fertile mind.