Leadership Styles: Steve Jobs vs. Tim Cook (Essay Sample)

Leadership Styles: Steve Jobs vs. Tim Cook
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Leadership Styles: Steve Jobs vs. Tim Cook
Steven Jobs has ever been a mercurial intelligent character with only one talent, which is the ability to turn good ideas into excellent products. On the other hand, Tim Cook is a guru when it comes to the operations and has been able to use his gift to hammer Apple’s production chain into something that can best be describes as a mechanized powerhouse. If in case one is an Apple devotee, this widely acknowledged narrative cannot be viewed as a new story (Richtel, and Chen 2014). Actually, the story of these two great CEOs together with their strengths and areas of weaknesses must be known to many, however, the fundamental question that disturbs many is; who among the two helmed the company more successfully than the other, with regards to their styles of leadership? This paper therefore tries to compare and contrast the leadership styles of the above-mentioned CEOs so that identifying the CEO with the most effective strategic plan may be possible.
It is very easy to let wistfulness twirl jobs into something of technical saint, however, the question on whether Steve Jobs’ time as the CEO of the Apple better that that of Tim Cook remains a debatable issue due to the fact that at the time Steve Jobs was serving as Apple’s CEO, the two great men worked hand-in-hand purposely to turn Apple into a juggernaut (Rauf, 2014). This did not actually cease the prediction of downfall of the company at Steve’s demise in 2011 after he had handed over the full leadership of the company to his co-founder Tim Cook (Summerfield, 2014). Even today, such fears still go around despite the fact that the company has been recognized as the most powerful and profitable in the entire world under Tim’s rein.
Steven Jobs was visionary and had an outstanding ability of gauging consumer market. with his strategic plan, the company managed to release many iconic products such as the iPod, the Mac, the iPad as well as the iPhone which can still be said confidently to be the reason why the company stands at its current position in world market (Rauf, 2014). With his strategic plan, Steve was in a position to fruitfully keep a reasonably high vertical integration, which is in itself a very impressive foot. It is important to point out that only Mac which was a non-compatible computer line introduced under Jobs’ rein has been able to survive to date. Above all, is the idea to come up with a fruitful army of their own retail store, an idea which appeared unwise at the time, but has beaten all the odds to become remarkably beneficial to the company (Sonnenfeld, 2013).
Cook on the other hand is an operational CEO and according to his strategic plan, it appears that his main objective is not to com