Apple shareholders demand CEO succession plan Later today Apple's board will be asked to reveal its plans for replacing the company's absent boss Steve Jobs. The current CEO is on medical leave from Cupertino for the third time in the past seven years. The Apple chief told staff in January that the company board had agreed to his taking time off from the Mac and iPhone …
The only question is when and how much. If they start talking about it now, the share price will drop, but not a huge amount. As time goes on it will recover somewhat. When Steve Jobs leaves, no matter how, it will drop. The amount it drops will depend on how scared everyone is. If they have a public succession plan, then it won't drop by a disasterous amount and should recover in a moderate amount of time. If there is no known succession plan then it will drop a lot and if the board looks like it doesn't know what to do, it will drop a disasterous amount and may never recover. Not only that, but if it drops enough, it would be a very tempting take over target for a lot of larger companies.
The smart thing to do is to start talking about it now, publicly, to calm fears. Unfortunately this involves long term planning and risk mitigation, something we americans are very, very poor at. Most companies can't plan or think more then three months ahead, let alone years.
Hanlon's Razor
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
It seems particularly appropriate in this situation.
Cook has been alongside Jobs since for ever so he is a natural to take over.
The board will find it tougher this time around since some the larger shareholders are also demanding he details apart from the union shareholder that first raised the matter.
Once Cook is named permanent CEO we will then find out whether he supports the 30% skim enforced since last week.
They could follow the North Korean practice and name Jobs 'Eternal President', as they did with Kim Il-sung who moved on in 1994. To preserve the body, placing the corpse in a glass bath with potassium acetate, alcohol, glycerol, distilled water, and as a disinfectant, quinine does the job and will require an 18 month repeat cycle. Then they could keep it in a glass box to wheel out on appropriate occasions. Russians are the experts in this.
"Apple doesn’t want to publicly disclose any such plan because the company is worried that it could affect retention of its top people, who might be lured away by rivals."
If that is the case then those same people should be creeped out even more with that little disclosure.
'We won't be offering you the job, but we would like you to think you will get it so you keep on working as hard as usual in your executive position trying to impress the board while we look at high tech firms in Hong Kong for imaginative replacements instead of those people currently in place. Do not fear though. Our stock prices, ummm, sorry staff is the most important thing in the world to us.'
Mr. Cook has my sympathies. Psuedo-CEO whose decisions can be over-ridden at a moments notice by his Jobness.
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