Design a team
Take Ive. There could be a reality in which some of this instability began with his departure. One argument might be that his leadership was what kept the design group together, and once he moved on the cadre collapsed. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t responsible; it was his department and it was his challenge to create a strong succession plan on his departure. Since leaving Apple and forming his own design company, Ive seemed to recruit many of his former staffers, many of whom now work at OpenAI following the sale of his AI company, io, to Apple’s competitor.
It is hard not to see that Apple’s design department post-Ive delivered little success, and while a lazy media class insisted on blaming then-CEO Tim Cook, the truth is that the CDO (Jony Ive was Apple’s Chief Design Officer before he resigned) held his throne long enough to have crafted a more successful approach. Identifying and developing successors is a key task of management anywhere, including in design departments. Problems should be managed down, not managed up.
Safe harbor
His subsequent move at his own company to rehire many of his old team — including Evans Hankey, his anointed successor as design lead at Apple (and co-founder of io), the company sold to OpenAI for over $6 billion — represented the shattering of design team cohesiveness at Apple.
