High-ranking Apple employees leave all the time. While some might consider this a worrisome state of affairs, given that talent departures can be both a cause and effect of low morale within the 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 told a large all-hands meeting last week. “You know, when people get to a certain age, some will retire. It’s kind of a natural thing.”
Cook is right when he says that time moves inexorably forward. Even the most dedicated employee will eventually reach a point where they stop enjoying the 9-to-5. (Most journalists reach that point sometime around their 30th birthday.) That goes some way to explaining why chief operating officer Jeff Williams retired in November and two other senior executives announced their retirements the following month. They did it for a while and didn’t want to do it anymore. As Cook says, it’s natural.
Still, it’s not like we’re talking about mandatory age-based retirement. Retirement is a choice. And while the fact of retirement is inevitable, the choices people make about when to retire can tell you a lot about their state of mind and what they think about the future of their organization. If people have decided that now is a good time to get out of Dodge, it is possible that they will see a firefight in the near future. Or a battle with artificial intelligence, for which Apple is not equipped.
What’s more, as Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman points out in his coverage of the all-hands meeting, these three retirements weren’t the only significant departures Apple has seen in the past few months. There was no mention of John Giannandreo, the AI chief who stepped down in December (and will retire in the spring) after Siri failed to make significant progress on his patrols. Neither did VP of software design Alan Dye, who left the same month to take a role at Meta. But you know, when people get to a certain age, some will work for Mark Zuckerberg. This is kind of a natural thing.
Incidentally, Alan Dye is far from alone in leaving Apple’s design team. On the hardware side, the company has lost Jony Ive, Evans Hankey, Marc Newson, and Abidur Chowdhury since 2019, along with a number of less famous but still notable employees.
Tim Cook says recent retirements were no surprise; they were, he insists, carefully organized. But it’s tempting to think about what society would look like if it experienced a surprise, disorganized onslaught. And how different it would look from the current situation at Apple, where departments are almost completely replaced in a few years and several senior managers are parachuted in at the same time.
The tech industry is notorious for its high employee turnover and reluctance to accept failure, as we saw with Giannandrea’s departure and perhaps with Dye, who was linked to the disappointing reception of Liquid Glass. Everyone has the right to resign when they have 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 where you moved to, not from. Jony Ive stayed with the company for 27 years because it offered challenging challenges and a creative environment (plus enough money to buy a bunch of Aston-Martins). Will we say the same about the current batch of Apple employees?
Cook, who has been with the company for 28 years, appears to be planning his own retirement. But it’s tempting to wonder if it needed to be pushed back in light of other departures. Does he mean orchestration?
The timing of your departure can be very important. Four great Australian cricketers retired at the same time in 2007 as they won everything there was to win and beating England 5-0 at home felt like a good place to stop. But that left a team full of gaps that ended up losing the next three Ashes series. If at all possible, you want people to stagger their departures. That’s what succession planning is all about. And for all Tim Cook’s positive words, that doesn’t seem to be happening at Apple right now.
Foundry
Welcome to our weekly Apple Breakfast column, featuring all the Apple news you missed last week in a handy summary. We call it Apple Breakfast because we think it goes great with a Monday morning cup of coffee or tea, but it’s also great if you want to read it over lunch or dinner.
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