Apple is Entering a Long Decline

At least one analyst is bucking the trend of gushing over Apple. Forrester Research chief executive George Colony laid out his case in a blog postWednesday for why he thinks the company will start looking like just another tech companies within the next four years unless it finds another “special, magical” leader like Steve Jobs. Colony’s position couldn’t be more contrarian. Apple just reported record March quarter profits while selling tens of millions of its iPhones, iPads, and Mac computers. In the past few months, other analysts have been jockeying to tout Apple’s share price, currently at just over $600 per share, for gains past the $800, $900, and even $1,000 threshold. But if Apple’s riding high now, that’s not going to last, according to Colony. “Apple will decline in the post Steve Jobs era,” he writes, explaining that Apple under Jobs fit the bill as a “charismatic organization … headed by people with the ‘gift of grace’.” Succession in such an organization is particularly difficult because while bureaucratic and traditional organizations have processes and rituals to elevate new leadership, “[i]n charismatic organizations, the magical leader must be succeeded by another charismatic—the emotional connection of employees and (in the case of Apple) customers demands it.” Colony quotes liberally from Max Weber’s The Theory of Social and Economic Organization and Adam Lashinky’s Inside Apple to build his case that Apple will “coast” over the next 24 to 48 months and “then decelerate.” What about the processes Jobs himself put in place at Apple to ensure that his vision and management style would endure at the company after he was gone? Apple University and other company initiatives fostered by Jobs won’t do the trick, Colony claims, quoting Weber: “Charisma can only be awakened and tested, it cannot be learned or taught.” Colony argues that Jobs’ successor, Tim Cook, has a “legal/bureaucratic approach” to leading Apple that “will prove to be a mismatch for an organization that feeds off the gift of grace.” Instead of Cook, the company should turn to Jonathan Ive or Scott Forstall to be CEO, the analyst writes. If Apple doesn’t get another magical charismatic leader, Colony concludes, it risks turning into Sony after Akio Morita or Polaroid post-Edwin Land—a company that goes from great to merely good in a few short years. wholesale accessories,ipad accessories,ipod accessories,iphone accessories