After Steve
How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul
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3 months free
After Steve
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Narrated by:
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Will Damron
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By:
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Tripp Mickle
About this listen
From the Wall Street Journal’s Tripp Mickle, the dramatic, untold story inside Apple after the passing of Steve Jobs by following his top lieutenants—Jony Ive, the Chief Design Officer, and Tim Cook, the COO-turned-CEO—and how the fading of the former and the rise of the latter led to Apple losing its soul.
Steve Jobs called Jony Ive his “spiritual partner at Apple.” The London-born genius was the second-most powerful person at Apple and the creative force who most embodies Jobs’s spirit, the man who designed the products adopted by hundreds of millions the world over: the iPod, iPad, MacBook Air, the iMac G3, and the iPhone. In the wake of his close collaborator’s death, the chief designer wrestled with grief and initially threw himself into his work designing the new Apple headquarters and the Watch before losing his motivation in a company increasingly devoted more to margins than to inspiration.
In many ways, Cook was Ive’s opposite. The product of a small Alabama town, he had risen through the ranks from the supply side of the company. His gift was not the creation of new products. Instead, he had invented countless ways to maximize a margin, squeezing some suppliers, persuading others to build factories the size of cities to churn out more units. He considered inventory evil. He knew how to make subordinates sweat with withering questions.
Jobs selected Cook as his successor, and Cook oversaw a period of tremendous revenue growth that has lifted Apple’s valuation to $3 trillion. He built a commanding business in China and rapidly distinguished himself as a master politician who could forge global alliances and send the world’s stock market into freefall with a single sentence.
Author Tripp Mickle spoke with more than 200 current and former Apple executives, as well as figures key to this period of Apple’s history, including Trump administration officials and fashion luminaries such as Anna Wintour while writing After Steve. His research shows the company’s success came at a cost. Apple lost its innovative spirit and has not designed a new category of device in years. Ive’s departure in 2019 marked a culmination in Apple’s shift from a company of innovation to one of operational excellence, and the price is a company that has lost its soul.
©2022 Tripp Mickle (P)2022 HarperCollins Publishers LimitedListeners also enjoyed...
Critic reviews
“Mickle penetrates the veil of secrecy shrouding one of the great dramas of modern business history: how Apple not only survived but thrived after the death of its brilliant, charismatic founder – and at what personal cost to his successors, Tim Cook and Jony Ive. After Steve is both a feat of reporting on what may be the most secretive company in the world and a gripping narrative that brings readers inside the “Spaceship,” Apple’s futuristic headquarters.” – James B. Stewart, author of New York Times bestsellers Den of Thieves, Blood Sport and DisneyWar
“Pulls off the rare feat of illuminating Apple's spiritual misdirections through the life and times of Jony Ive before and after Steve Jobs's death. This extraordinary book has a lot of heart, but also lessons on how a visionary company can lose its soul in search of even greater profits." – Bradley Hope, co-author of the New York Times bestseller Billion Dollar Whale
“Mickle pierced Apple's culture of omerta to deliver an intimate portrait of how Steve Jobs's top disciples – Tim Cook, the inscrutable operator, and Jony Ive, the passionate artist – grappled with the loss of their master and their own differences to bring his creation to unprecedented success.” – Sara Gay Forden, author of House of Gucci and editor at Bloomberg News
“A thrilling account of the characters, intrigues, and decisions that drove Apple to become the world’s most valuable corporation. After Steve is sure to become the definitive account of the post-Jobs era at Apple.”– Bhu Srinivasan, author of Americana
“A fascinating look at Apple in the post-Jobs era. Mickle highlights the link between professional dynamics and personal relationships and how large-cap companies need different skills as they scale. A master class in how creatives and operators work together to build value.” – Scott Galloway, best-selling author of The Four and Post Corona
great book on life after Steve Jobs
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Well paced and informative
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Good listen
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Good info on post Jobs Apple but told in a sensationalist manner
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Interesting
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The first half of this book provides the reader with plenty of context and backstory, especially where Cook is concerned.
As an IT industry analyst, I was aware of Cook’s background at IBM and Compaq, both Behemoths of the PC industry, but this book provides additional insight.
For those people interested in how Apple outperformed the competition, we get a glimpse of the tried and tested techniques employed by Cook: Lean/JIT, Six Sigma, and TOC (Theory of Constraints).
Plenty of lessons to learn from this book if you read in between the lines.
Learn how Tim Cook made Apple what it is today
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The book is really the tale of two men who were to lead the company going forward. Jony Ive had been the Chief Design Officer during the period Jobs introduced the iPod, iPhone and iPad. He and Steve had formed a close partnership, with Jobs dropping in on Ive and his team just about every day. The second figure is, of course, Tim Cook who took over as CEO of the company following the death of Jobs. Cook had formerly been the company’s Chief Operating Officer. If Jobs was authoritarian and a galvanizing force for the company then Cook was democratic in his approach and more focussed on the numbers than the minute details of the products. They were, in fact, chalk and cheese.
This book walks us through Steve’s time at Apple (a scene setter) before focussing thereafter on Ive and Cook. We learn a good deal about what shaped these men and what drove them on, or made them tick. They were very different people: Ive the aesthete and Cook the operations man, forever with his eye on the financial spreadsheet. The chemistry between the two never came close to that established between Ive and Jobs. Eventually Jony became burnt out and, craving more autonomy, left to set up a business of his own. The book points out that despite Cook’s very different style and focus (he eventually turned more towards generating income from services more so than new products) the company's income continued to grow under his leadership.
It’s all told as a story, based on hundreds of interviews with an army of unnamed colleagues, friends and acquaintances of key players. In fact, this is just the way I like to imbibe this sort of information, I loved it and found the whole book to be hugely informative and yet still entertaining, in equal measure. Highly recommended.
Informative and Entertaining
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This book actually made me consider how different things are on the inside, and the success that the company achieved was in large part due to huge internal changes and how the design team had to face new realities of living under a different CEO, who largely stays out of the day-to-day of managing product development. A great account of life behind the veil of secrecy.
I would argue though this book doesn't really answer the question of how Apple 'lost its soul' though. There was no post-story analysis of why the author is arguing their narrative, rather simply telling the story of a post- Jobs company, and leaving the reader with an interesting inside scoop, but not having been convinced the company has lost its soul in my opinion.
There was one small part which was recounted by Ive, where he believed Apple had turned from a company focused on design first, to becoming a machine. This was probably the only part of the story I could interpret as losing its soul, but not much else. The leaps in technology 10 years ago was just greater per cycle, and had much more sex appeal than it does today.
Mobile phone hardware was novel and innovative then, whereas now we all have these devices and its harder to reinvent them as we have everything we need. Maybe you could argue that the iPhone has had it's day, and to keep going, Apple must find a new way to dominate, but to say its lost its soul without Steve... well you can never say, as the technological world we live in today isn't what it was in 2011.
But I think over-all, it was very thought provoking and I'd recommend to anyone who is interested in the story of Apple.
Informative and engaging
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Specifically, now I've finished the book I think the title is very apt, it's not making an opinion as to if it's more or less successful than before, the whole story taken in is summarised correctly as the story of a company losing its identity but simultaneously being the most successful company in history.
I've read and followed a lot about Apple and technology and found the insights about the Apple Watch (being initially seen as a miss) and Project Titan fascinating.
I think it teaches a lot about the importance of strong leadership, the moral ambiguity at senior leadership level (say/do one thing in America, say/do the opposite in China) and how squeezing the golden goose might not always be a bad thing.
I really hope in the future there is a little epilogue to add in some narrative on Vision Pro (as the Operator vs Artist story must've had huge impact on this launch).
Great story of the Post-Jobs era and it’s main characters: Artist & Operator
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Really good sequel to Walter isaacsons Jobs biography
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