Since Steve Jobs announced he's leaving until June, two questions have circulated through the media. I know the answer to one, not to the other.
What I don't know is whether he's coming back.
The question I can answer is, what will a Jobs-free Apple be like?
Thanks to the authors of Tribal Leadership (Dave Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright), we can predict with some certainty what will happen. How can we know? The Jobs style of leadership always plays out the same way. The uniqueness in the Apple case is in his personality, not his type of leadership.
Jobs is a controlling genius. In "The Trouble With Steve Jobs," Fortune editor Peter Elkind wrote: "He oozes smug superiority, lacing his public comments with ridicule of Apple's rivals, which he casts as mediocre, evil, and - worst of all - lacking taste. No CEO is more willful, or more brazen, at making his own rules, in ways both good and bad."
This leadership type is what Tribal Leadership calls "Stage Three," runs on the mantra "I'm great (and you're not)," and looks like a lone warrior. Stage Three works by setting up a group of people, giving them marching orders (or a vision), and then letting them do their thing. In Jobs's case, when people drift off course, he descends like a school teaching nun, ruler in hand, to get them back in line. Then they continue, shaken but with a goal that is nearly miraculously in sync with what the market will love. As long as people stay within the lines of his directives, their work is brilliant. Groups stay on task, departments are aligned, and the Apple machine remains the envy of corporate America.
The problem is with Stage Three is that it has two design flaws, and these will evenutally undo Apple. The first is that Jobs-like leaders don't allow others to do what they do. As a result, Apple runs on loyalty to one man's vision. Like anything else, this vision has a finite lifespan. Thomas Edison and Henry Ford were the same--and their visions were irrelevant soon after they left their companies.
Second, the lone warrior will never allow another to out-shine them. As New York Times writer Brad Stone noted last week: "Part of the problem, say people who were at Apple during the lean years, could be traced back to Mr. Jobs himself: he had not allowed anyone with talents similar to his own to rise at the company. Some think that may also be true today."
And there's the rub. Jobs has never allowed anyone to out-genius him. Those he is leaving in charge are "mini me" Jobs, not geniuses in their own right. Apple's bench is filled with talented people loyal to the Jobs vision, not visionaries in their own right. Under their direction, Apple will begin to drift, like a top that's been spun and starts to run out of energy. Products will be near misses, rather than runaway successes. The Apple fans will forgive a few missteps.
What they won't forgive is what will happen next. The revolutionary product designs won't shake markets or excite consumer demand. They'll be off target enough that they will come across as interesting but odd. Expect more Apple TV and less iPhone.
The genius will have left the building.
The question for those who remain is this: will leaders recognize that Apple needs to rewire itself so it embodies geniuses rather than trying to find a replacement for Jobs. If they do, here's what they should do next (again, from the Tribal writers):
First, avoid the easy solution of finding an heir apparent. Apple isn't the Vatican, and appointing a new Pope will only guarantee Apple's eventual irrelevancy. Stage Three leadership doesn't build lasting success.
Second, leaders of all types need to come together and define the genius that they no longer have. What values drove it? What overall vision inspired it? How did Jobs know what they market wanted before the market itself knew? This genius needs to become the real leader of the company--not as a person, but as an enduring organizational vision.
Third, as a group, how can leaders build this genius into the company? The truth is that Jobs did what he did because he had the Apple resources and contacts to draw on. The challenge is to allow Apple's inherent genius to formulate new processes that outlive the man himself.
Fourth, how can Apple remove all genius barriers from the company? They need new "outliers" (as Malcolm Gladwell calls them) to come along with visions that are different from Jobs' but consistent with the values of Apple.
Once Job leaves, the goal shouldn't be to replace him, it should be to break the company's genius addiction. The tribe has to become the genius.