14 DAY TRIAL // Bloomberg is running a feature piece on what happens to executives after they leave Apple Inc. In the report, an analyst with Needham Research calls the late Steve Jobs a “dictator.”
It’s no secret that everyone at Apple was pulling all-day shifts during Steve Jobs’ tenure as CEO. But when the visionary genius finally lost the battle with pancreatic cancer, that – and a lot of other things – changed.
“The pressure on these guys was incredible,” says Charlie Wolf, an analyst at Needham Research. “They were working 30-hour days. A lot of them just wanted out of it,” adds Wolf, who has covered Apple for over 20 years.
The feature piece details the ups and downs of some of those executives that “wanted out.” Many of them – including Ron Johnson, who recently got fired from his CEO role with JC Penney – didn’t manage to replicate their success outside of Apple, and Wolf believes it’s all because of Steve Jobs.
“Apple was not a good training ground,” he says. “It was dictatorial. You had one person running the show there, and everybody else had to do what the dictator wanted.”