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July 29, 2019○ Apple’s heir apparent runs
the company’s operations.
Can he also handle design—
and everything else?When Apple announced the pending departure of
Chief Design Officer Jony Ive last month, it threw
the spotlight on an executive few outsiders know:
Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams, who’s also
taken over the company’s celebrated design stu-
dio. This added fiefdom makes Williams unambig-
uously the second-most important person at Apple
and Tim Cook’s heir apparent as chief executive offi-
cer. And he’s very much in the mold of the current
CEO: a paragon of operational efficiency and even
temper not prone to quite the same highs and lows
of Cook’s more visionary predecessor, Steve Jobs.
Several current and former colleagues, who
spoke on the condition of anonymity because
they weren’t authorized to speak publicly, say
that during his years as the company’s operations
chief, Cook’s old job, Williams distinguished him-
self as a modest, disciplined, demanding leader in
the current CEO’s style. He’s negotiated with sup-
pliers, shipped hundreds of millions of devices
a year from Chinese factories to the rest of the
globe, and been a bit more hands-on with prod-
uct development than Cook, they say. Williams
attends weekly reviews of product and industrial
design progress, subsequently briefing Cook for a
final signoff, and has been the lead executive shep-
herding the Apple Watch to market. Within Apple,
he’s broadly regarded as a strong choice for the top
job, and current and former colleagues say man-
agement had been steadily positioning him as such
long before Ive’s departure.
Williams’s elevation has also heightened wor-
ries about the company’s ability to jolt itself out of
a perceived complacency. Under Cook’s tenure,
Apple Inc. has more than doubled its market value,
which briefly topped $1 trillion, and sold hundreds
of millions of customers more expensive lines of
iPhones and iPads, wireless AirPods, and subscrip-
tion services such as Apple Music. Yet after a period
of astonishing growth, unit sales of the iPhone,
which have long accounted for about two-thirds of
revenue, have been essentially flat for years, and the
company has struggled to compete in fast-growing
markets such as China and India.
Since its rescue from the brink of bankruptcy
in the late 1990s, Apple has prided itself on mak-
ing pricey products into mainstream hits on theEdited by
Jeff Muskus and
Dimitra Kessenides