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What Does Jony Ive’s Departure From Apple Tell Us About Leadership Lifecycles?

This article is more than 4 years old.

Even Apple products have product lifecycles. And even Apple itself, with its trillion-dollar success, will one day reach a state of maturity – which is a kinder way of saying it will grow old.

Leaders move on. Products become mature, and what is new and exciting is not indefinitely sustainable. The news that Apple’s chief design officer, Sir Jonathan “Jony” Ive, will leave the firm later this year to focus on his own creative studio, LoveFrom, has incited much comment and – from some – concern that this marks the end of a golden age for the tech behemoth. For in the years since Apple’s near-bankruptcy in 1997, Ive’s aesthetic judgment has shaped every product that Apple has taken to market.

But perhaps Ive’s talismanic status is a distraction, and he is not the architect of all Apple’s success. Conflicting reports of team spirit within Apple’s design wing have emerged, with Bloomberg painting a picture of a creatively constrained division blighted by the recent departures of other, more junior, long-timers. In parallel, the Financial Times hails a team galvanised by the firm’s move to the futuristic Apple Park (designed, of course, with Ive’s input), where industrial and human-interface designers at last occupy the same space.

It doesn’t matter which scenario you choose to believe, for they both represent the same thing: a starting point for change and new beginnings.

Like iconic brands, some management tools stand the test of time and one, developed by Igor Ansoff in 1957, certainly does. Ansoff categorized the options open to companies when developing their product portfolios, and the related risk implications.

In a nutshell, you have three choices: keep selling the same products to the same customers – a strategy for decline; look for new customers for your existing products, or diversify by selling more and different products to the same customers.

To a large extent, Apple has been following two paths and successfully managed both: hatching a set of iconic product ideas, and adapting them ruthlessly to delight their existing customers and, at the same time, expanding into new markets. The highest-risk strategy is to develop products you’ve never made before, with the intention of selling them to customers you’ve not yet met – two unknowns. This may be where Apple finds itself now.

Very few brands last forever. Coca-Cola has been around since 1886, and John Deere since 1837 – but they are rare exceptions, compared to all those that have fallen by the wayside and are never spoken of again. Apple has no inherent right to be one of those brands that lasts for centuries.

Perhaps Ive has indeed been the brilliant designer who has defined what Apple is, and looks like – but, as a result, there’s never been enough room for other ideas, so people who would challenge the firm’s creative ethos with new perspectives are either not joining the organization, or not staying.

Perhaps Ive has been associated with more of the innovation than was actually the case – for Apple employs teams of designers. Or perhaps decisions are arrived at collectively and collaboratively, making authorship hard to pin down – but the culture of Apple is that they have been allowed to belong to Ive regardless.

But Apple does so many things well – from marketing and promotion to operations – that in order for the firm to survive into the future, to carry on being an iconic brand, to create new products that will delight new customers, one person won’t be enough to sustain it – because one person probably never was.

It all comes down to that recognition that neither products nor leaders last forever. So this is a great opportunity to bring in a new approach – a new team – that isn’t constrained by the legacy, and can therefore explore whole new ways of being Apple, of what Apple means, and really build on what the firm is so good at.

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