Ethical Chic: The Inside Story of the Companies We Think We Love by Fran Hawthorne

Author:Fran Hawthorne [Hawthorne, Fran]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business & Economics, Consumer Behavior, Corporate & Business History, Business Ethics
ISBN: 9780807000946
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2012-06-19T00:00:00+00:00

It’s not just the products that are the object of Apple fans’ devotion. So is Steve Jobs.

No wonder, really. A guy rated one of “The World’s Most Influential People” by Time in 2010, called one of “27 Brave Thinkers” by the Atlantic in 2009 and one of just 21 in 2011, listed under “Revolutionaries”—not merely zillionaires—in the 2009 Forbes “400 Richest People in America” roster, even hailed as “CEO of the Decade” by Fortune in 2009. The book Apple Confidential 2.0 describes the reaction at the 2000 Macworld, when Jobs announced that he would be the permanent CEO: “The Mac faithful that filled San Francisco’s Moscone Center rose to their feet, chanting, ‘Steve! Steve! Steve!’” There were similar frenzies when he introduced the Mac in 1984 and when he came back to Apple from exile in 1997. Stephen Fry—the writer-actor who drooled over the iPad in Time—offered that “I have met five British Prime Ministers, two American Presidents, Nelson Mandela, Michael Jackson, and the Queen. My hour with Steve Jobs certainly made me more nervous than any of those encounters.”

So when Jobs got a rare form of pancreatic cancer in 2004, then inexplicably lost weight and took a mysterious health leave in 2009, followed by a liver transplant, and again in early 2011 announced that he was taking another indefinite leave of absence to deal with medical issues, terror coursed through the Apple world. What if he didn’t . . . ? The thought was too horrible to contemplate. The stock price gyrated with each medical report, shooting up after the liver transplant, plunging briefly at the news of the 2011 medical leave, rising smartly again when Jobs interrupted his 2011 leave to introduce, in person, a new version of the iPad. At his first news conference upon returning to work after the transplant, employees and even journalists (journalists?) gave Jobs a standing ovation.

Then, in late August 2011, the first unthinkable happened: Apple announced that Jobs was stepping down as CEO, to be replaced by Chief Operating Officer Timothy D. Cook—although Jobs would presumably keep a lot of fingers on the keyboard as chairman of the board.

The universe shook: The announcement led the news at the Wall Street Journal and other newspapers; hundreds of thousands of messages were posted on Twitter and elsewhere, fans flocked to Apple stores in a kind of makeshift wake, and the stock slid more than 5 percent in after-hours trading. The New York Times called him “the da Vinci of our time.”

Things calmed down within a couple of days. The stock picked up nicely; after all, the company’s product line was strong, and it had some $76 billion in cash to cushion any problems. The experts’ consensus was that there were enough Jobs-created gizmos in the pipeline to carry the karma another two or three years, and Jobs would still be sort-of around as chairman, but a key issue was how many other people would leave. The headlines faded, replaced by a hurricane on the East Coast and the ongoing fall of Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi.

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