Clearing the deck before a CEO transition is exactly what good boards and good CEOs do. — Reuters
At a normal company, people come and go. Top executives leave and move on to other roles and companies. Lower-level employees find a better job and post a “life update” on Threads. It’s a pretty, well, normal thing that happens all the time.
Apple, on the other hand, seems to enjoy a remarkable level of stability in this regard. Obviously, Apple employs a lot of people, and I’m sure a lot of them are looking for a new job at any given time. Many of the people on the iPhone maker’s leadership page, however, have been there for a decade or more. Turnover at the top – with a few exceptions –i s rare.
Partly that’s because the company’s history is one long case study in slow, deliberate succession. When Steve Jobs handed the CEO role to Cook in 2011, it wasn’t a surprise to anyone inside the company. The groundwork had been laid for years, and Cook had already stepped in as interim CEO once before.
Now, however, we’ve seen a handful of departures over the past few weeks, and some see it as a sign that there’s something wrong. First, there were reports that Tim Cook plans to step down in early 2026. Then, Jeff Williams, who had been chief operating officer since 2015, retired. Alan Dye, the head of human interface design, left for Meta. John Giannandrea is leaving, as are Lisa Jackson and Kate Adams. And, former CFO, Luca Maestri, retired at the beginning of 2025.
Then there were the rumours that Apple’s chip chief, Johnny Srouji, was looking to exit, though it seems that reporting may have been premature. Srouji told his staff he wasn’t “planning to leave any time soon,” but someone gave the idea to Bloomberg, who reported that he had been in conversations about going elsewhere.
Even if Srouji isn’t going anywhere, the collective exodus is hard to ignore. After all, if that many people are leaving, something must be up, right?
Maybe. On the other hand, the fact that a number of people are leaving doesn’t mean there’s something wrong. I’d argue it’s actually pretty normal. In fact, I think it makes perfect sense, especially if it’s true that Cook is planning to retire in the next 12 to 18 months. In that case, this looks like the change is probably the result of a CEO saying to everyone working for him that this is the time to get out if you’re going to go.
Clearing the deck before a CEO transition is exactly what good boards and good CEOs do. You want the next CEO to inherit a stable operating machine, not a cabinet full of long-tenured lieutenants who owe their loyalty to someone else. Or, even worse, an entire executive floor that decides to leave shortly after the CEO moves into their office.
It’s also worth mentioning that the executives who matter most to Apple’s day-to-day business seem to be sticking around. The executives leading hardware and software engineering, as well as services and operations, aren’t going anywhere. Well, technically, the head of hardware engineering, John Ternus, is the odds-on favorite to become CEO when Cook leaves.
Seen through that lens, the current moment feels less like an exodus and more like Apple doing the hardest part of succession early. These are the uncomfortable moves, and they can indeed look messy from the outside. They are the ones that are easiest to postpone and hardest to execute.
Apple is choosing to execute them now.
None of this guarantees that a Tim Cook retirement is imminent. Apple does not telegraph timelines, and Cook himself has given no public signal other than when he told Kara Swisher in 2021 that he didn’t expect to still be CEO “in 10 years.” But if he were planning to step down in the next year, this is exactly what competent transition planning would look like.
The real risk for Apple would not be leaders leaving ahead of a transition. The real risk would be pretending no transition is coming at all, or if the entire C-suite turned over after naming a new CEO. That would look like a total lack of confidence in the new leader. This, on the other hand, just looks like good planning. Sure, it’s disruptive, but it’s a lot better to put a little space between these departures, and what will surely be a much bigger transition to come.
The bottom line is that it might be tempting to see this wave as something going wrong. In reality, however, it’s a sign that Apple is doing this leadership transition right. – Inc./Tribune News Service
