As Steve Jobs goes on medical leave (see stories below) thoughts go to management of Apple. Fortunately Apple has an extremely deep bench of talent undoubtedly one of the top management teams in the U.S. CEOs who are 'less competent' sometimes hire poor quality subordinates as they don't want to be overshadowed but Jobs is a supremely intelligent and confident person and he has gathered over the years a top notch team.
A brief look at some of the more in the limelight Apple senior executives:
-- Tim Cook COO : He's been at Apple since 1998 (more about him here) He helped Apple win AMR's company top Supply Chain company unprecedented 3 years in a row beating the supply chain kings like Dell and Wal-mart. One reason why a 10 inch iPad is 499 and the wifi Dell Streak 1 was $599.
( I have no doubt he's as competent or more so than any CEO in the tech world).
-- Jon Ive : Apple's senior designer, genius who shaped candy imacs to iPhones. Winner of the inaugural Designer of the Year Award of the Design Museum Britain. Apple stuff he's designed is in the Museum of Modern Art in the U.S.
-- Scott Forstall: software guru who helped coordinate the transformation of OSX into iOS which is used in the iPhone, iPad (products which are winners of customer satisfaction awards from JDPower, ChangeWave multiple times, devices of the year etc)
-- Ron Johnson VP of Retail -- who masterminded Apple Stores from nothing to highest grossing per square foot retail in the U.S beating out Tiffany's etc.
There are many others as I've only highlighted those more well known to the public, others like Phil Shiller, Mansfield (Mac hardware), Oppenheimer CFO (who helped Apple gather one the largest piles of change ever at $51 billion) etc. all extremely competent people. List of top Apple executives. When Apple exec Rubenstein (one of the father's of iPod) went to Palm, the stock skyrocketed.
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Steve Jobs is one of the kind and probably irreplaceable but even without him Apple's management rivals any in the corporate world.
