Star Gil Amelio's Reign at Apple, and his Eventual Ouster
Linked by Thomas Hormby on Wed 17th Nov 2004 19:43 UTC
Apple According to many economists, Gilbert Amelio is the savior of businesses in trouble. With this in mind, the board of directors at Apple decided to appoint Gil Amelio to the board after reporting another huge loss in 1994. At the time, Michael Spindler was the head of Apple, and sales in every division. The board accepted Spindler's resignation and appointed Gil Amelio to the helm of Apple.
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All my dealings with Apple as well as most of my contacts inside showed me that Apple was a company that had a serious, serious problem. OK, two big ones.

The first being that it was akin a herd of cats, everyone doing his/her own thing, virtually ignoring what management was saying. You could have a CEO that would say something like "this way, follow me!", and virtually everyone would simply ignore him. Litterally. This was compounded by a myriad of empire-building middle-managers and all sorts of "techno-slackers" who only worked on what they wanted when they wanted. Somehow, Steve Jobs was the only one that had the authority, the clout, whatever, to put an end to all of this. That's why one of his first tasks when he came back was to pare (sp?) down the ranks. If you were on the elevator with Steve and could not explain who you were and what you were doing by the time you'd reach your floor, you'd be fired. Steve Jobs has been the first ever Apple CEO that made everyone walk in the same direction, AFAICT.

The other big problem is the fact that Apple management (I'm not sure if that extended way up to the CEO) measured their success just by year-to-year improvements in *their* numbers and did not look at the big picture. "Hey, we're selling half a billion more this year compared to last, we're doing great!" The problem was that the overall market grew even more and their market share dropped. But who cares about market share when you're selling for 10billions$ a year?

At least Jobs is aware of this and has been working hard at improving these numbers. The jury is still out on this one and I guess it will take a few more years before we see the end-result. This is definitively not a short-term strategy.