"Greg Abel is the right CEO for today's BRK - actually, a better fit for BRK today than Buffett would be. My thinking changed when I started thinking about Tim Cook, who recently announced his departure from the CEO position at Apple. Tim Cook is no Steve Jobs. But there is no other Steve Jobs. The probability of another Steve Jobs replacing Steve Jobs is nearly zero. As I look at Tim Cook's tenure, I can see that if he and Steve had run Apple together, the company could have been a lot more successful."
"Tim, as Jobs himself described him, "is not a product guy," and so he failed to come up with another product of the iPhone's magnitude. The Apple Car, which could have been that product, was a giant failure with several changes of direction and eventual disbandment. Apple Vision Pro felt half-baked - I'm not sure Steve Jobs would ever have released it. Siri, revolutionary when it launched on the iPhone, today has the IQ of a toaster compared to other AI models. Apple just settled a class-action lawsuit for exaggerating the AI capabilities of its newest iPhones."
"And yet, Tim Cook did an incredible job running Apple. Through small, incremental improvements, he cemented the iPhone as an indispensable device. In the Jobs era, the Apple ecosystem was its biggest competitive advantage - Cook doubled down on it, with all devices working seamlessly together. He extended Apple's software advantage into hardware, abandoning Intel for in-house M chips, which power MacBooks with multiples of the battery life of the Intel processors"
Greg Abel’s leadership style differs from Warren Buffett’s charisma, warmth, and humor, but that difference can match Berkshire Hathaway’s present requirements. A comparison with Apple’s leadership transition shows that replacing a unique founder is unlikely to happen, so success depends on adapting to the company’s needs rather than replicating the founder’s personality. Tim Cook was not Steve Jobs and did not deliver another iPhone-level product, with efforts like Apple Car and Apple Vision Pro falling short. Even so, Cook strengthened Apple by making incremental improvements, cementing the iPhone’s indispensability, deepening the ecosystem across devices, and extending software advantages into hardware with in-house M chips that improve battery life.
Read at Fortune
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