If you put Tim Cook on the assembly line or on the cash register at an Apple store, do you think he would even keep up?
If you took someone off the assembly line and make them CEO, would Apple's output crater to 1/1400th of what they produce today?
If you took someone off the assembly line and make them CEO, would Apple's output crater to 1/1400th of what they produce today?
Conversely, putting Tim Apple on a cash register would just slow down 1 cash register.
Impossible to know for sure (can't A/B test history), but my guess would be "probably".
Replacing one individual from the C-Suite could maybe get carried by the rest.
And yes, the other way would work fine. Having the C-Suite take over an individual store would be fine.
I also have no doubt that if you took a random apple store employee and gave them Tim Cook's education that they could be a passable CEO.
Ok fair.
I think comparing that to a few weeks of training to run a store is wild.
Do you think someone working in an Apple store would rather be there than getting an MBA at Duke? or being COO somewhere? Tim Cook was incredibly privileged to get the education and opportunities that he did. I'm not saying he wouldn't be a better CEO than most, but most people don't get to try so we don't know that fact. He's absolutely not 1400x times better than people with similar education. Even Apple isn't doing that well. If luck had him become CEO of IBM instead of Apple we wouldn't be praising him as "extraordinary" just because of circumstance.
I'd wager that 80% of the English speaking adult US population could be trained to work in an Apple store and do fine within a few weeks.
If you want to talk about compensation like a "fair market" and that there's only 1 Tim Cook so per the rules of supply/demand he can charge a ton for his services, then we have to also acknowledge that the market to acquire those skills is unfair. You cannot base a fair market on the output of an unfair one, they are both unfair. Tim Cook's compensation is unfair.
Yes, I agree with this.
> The market to acquire those skills is unfair
So far so good. I agree with this. This is why I try to vote for people who support expanding access to education, for example.
> You cannot base a fair market on the output of an unfair one, they are both unfair. Tim Cook's compensation is unfair.
This is where you lose me. You can't connect the two like that. The unfair path to get to the position of CEO is a separate conversation to what that compensation should be to be considered fair.
As for your second paragraph, keep in mind that there was a string of highly qualified CEOs who tried and failed to run Apple when it was a far smaller company — Sculley, Spindler, and Amelio were no dummies.
Tim Cook can't make and sell iPhones by himself. The C-Suite can't do it by themselves. Management can't do it. The designers can't do it. It's not until you consider the whole team, including store employees and assembly line workers that Apple can produce iPhones. It takes the WHOLE team.
Why is 1 member of a team of people who all have to work together to achieve their shared goal paid 1400x more than average? Does that seem fair?
Yes, it takes tens of thousands of people to design, make and sell Apple's products. Tim would be the first to acknowledge that. Does this mean that each of them is equally valuable to the company and equally hard to replace? No. (Which is not a statement about their worth as _human beings_, mind you).
What we have going on here, I think, is a set of businesses which typically have (at minimum) two tiers - the "network tier" where your value is your personal connections, education, wealth and power: highly leveragable into success of a single or multiple businesses that you sit with, and the "production tier" - people who actually do the f'ing work of turning the network tier's demands into something that resembles it in reality.
Businesses that don't have both aren't likely to thrive.
Resulting questions: what are the true directional dependencies between those two groups, and how do they each sustain them? Could that be made healthier for all participants?
I have no doubt that this has probably already been explored by economic philosophers in other, more precise terms: this is just my naive attempt to put the patterns into my own words.
Replace the entire c-suite with no one and the division leaders below will fill the space which would probably end up with a better product. Replace them with the lowest paid (do the Chinese kids working in the factories count? If not 18 year old factory worker in Wuhan would) they will be quickly running the place with a group of friends who know what 18 year olds likes.
This would boost revenue per share because you remove all c-suites.
Csuite replaces frontline workers, and vice versa...the workers can use a shark-tank like group of business people as advisers (because anybody in this sort of position would be a fool NOT to reach out to people who know what they're doing --at least for the start of things) ...then see how much things change.... keep the experiment going until it's deemed the company is losing too much value, etc.. profits from the reality show could make up some of that loss perhaps.
Or payroll ends up being too expensive when they have a down quarter and they have to deal with layoffs.
Suddenly this show seems like a horrible idea.
Being an extraordinary CEO is very difficult.
Ironically I want to be a CEO but of a worker-coop that has a cap on pay, union-built in, and flat management style... read: ethical CEO.
Steve Jobs setup Apple with so much success that I would have given half of Tim's salary to Steve's estate and still felt that we are ripping off of Steve.
Tim Cook is a caretaker CEO who didn't add that value himself. He was smart enough not to do anything to take Apple off of the path it was on but lacks vision. Apple sits on boatloads of money that could have been used to secure a key vertical in the future.
No, never said anything of the sort.
> Tim Cook is a caretaker CEO who didn't add that value himself.
The market cap begs to differ. He is far from the product visionary that Steve Jobs was but he is great at execution. There is a reason Jobs picked him as his successor.