Being the successor of a successful leader is one of the toughest challenges. How can you do more? There’s a lot to lose and few chances to win. Should you replicate the winning leadership style of your predecessor? The chances are that you will likely do worse. Should you change and build a new style? You risk destroying a well-tuned machine that works perfectly.
Three years ago Tim Cook accepted such a challenge. After a transient of three years without significant innovative product launches, yesterday he unveiled his first move into a new product category: smartwatches. He announced the Apple Watch with the well-known sentence that Steve Jobs used at the end of his speeches: “One more thing…” Regardless of what you thought of the latest smartwatch, those words are a cause for concern.
Like others’ initial reactions to the Apple Watch, mine are mixed. It has an excellent design. Apple also obviously worked intensively on the user experience. And it provides some delightful features, such as the digital touch that allow a new type of social interactions among people who wear the watch and are next to each other (e.g. by sending your heartbeat to the watch of your lucky friend).
But is the new smartwatch another example of Apple entering an emerging product category late and proposing a new interpretation that offers a more meaningful user experience? I’m not totally convinced. This time Apple seems less bold. It does not really reinvent the category; its differences from other smartwatches already on the market (e.g., Motorola’s Moto, Sony’s SmartWatch, andSamsung’s Gear) are not striking. Some commentators likened this lack of breakthrough features to other Apple copycat moves (e.g., the new iPhone 6’s bigger screens, which follows Samsung’s lead). According to some, this is a sign that Apple has lost its magical touch.
That said, the Apple Watch could be a winner. Customers (and app developers) will ultimately determine its success.
I’m more concerned about the tone of yesterday’s event and what it reveals about Apple’s leadership. The event came across like a replay of a movie I had already seen: the same format used by Steve Jobs — the same staging, colors, lighting, pace, and agenda; (almost) the same faces and voices, with the same magnifying adjectives celebrating the products features; the same “one more thing,” and the same band (U2) closing the event. In some moments, the thin silhouette of Tim Cook even reminded me of Jobs.
Apple loves art. So let me use an art-based analogy to describe my feelings. Yesterday’s extravaganza looked as if Apple’s leadership had entered a Mannerism period: In the 16th century, after the radical changes introduced by Renaissance masters like Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo, many artists found it difficult to blaze a new path and instead copied and exaggerated their predecessors’ styles. It was a more sophisticated but also more artificial way of painting that lost the harmonious and natural dynamics of the Renaissance. In other words, yesterday’s extravaganza came across to me like an exaggerated celebration of Jobs’s style.
For Apple, the risk is Cook is applying a leadership recipe that has run its course. Every organization needs rituals, self-celebration, and stability, of course. But it also needs renewal. Not only because markets and competition change, but also because people in an organization — especially the youngest and freshest members of it — need new causes. They need new rituals and “manners” that they have helped create. This gives them a sense of ownership of the future and fuels new energies. As several innovation and strategy studies show, the most pernicious competitor of a successful organization is not out there in the market; it’s inside. Perhaps the strongest competitor of today’s Apple is Jobs’s Apple.
For Cook, as a leader and as a person, the risk is that by staying on the same path, he will never be “as good as Steve.” The risk is that one day, looking back to these years, he will have a feeling of having been good but never good enough. For sure, Cook’s leadership style has been forged by his closeness to Jobs. And for sure, there is a sense of emotional attachment, a sense of gratitude. But no one is the same. Perhaps Cook’s own style would be good for Apple and allow it to achieve greater heights; perhaps not. But at least he should give his organization and himself a chance to do so.
My hope is now that Tim has proven he can lead Steve’s way, he will feel free to move on and lead Tim’s way.
ROBERTO VERGANTI
Roberto Verganti is the author of Design-Driven Innovation: Changing the Rules of Competition by Radically Innovating What Things Mean. He is a professor of management of innovation at Politecnico di Milano and a member of the Design Leadership Board of the European Commission.
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