Tim Cook: The Challenges of Running Apple in Shadow of Steve Jobs

By David Tobia
October 5, 2012

Since Steve Jobs passed away, CEO Tim Cook has approached Apple with less creativity, but also with more maturity, suggests Businessweek.
Cook has increased the value of Apple, improved working conditions at Chinese manufacturing partner Foxconn and diplomatically worked with investors to provide the dividend that Jobs notoriously refused to offer.
Cook has also improved Apple’s operational capacity, “lining up the company’s suppliers to support the unprecedented scale of the iPhone 5 launch,” according to the article.
Apple stock has risen 75 percent under Cook and has become the world’s most valuable company. “Tim has seemingly pulled off what many people doubted he could, which is to sustain and add to Apple’s incredible momentum,” says Michael Useem, director of the Center for Leadership and Change Management at the Wharton School.
While Apple has seen initial success under new leadership, it remains a question whether Cook can successfully launch products not yet imagined (arguably Jobs’s greatest asset).
For now, Apple is spending much of its resources on developing laser cutting technologies to create even thinner products, and on the development of its own customized chips. If Apple could develop its own line of chips, it could distinguish itself further from other products that run on Intel chips.

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