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An Evening with Jed York at the 49ers Camp
Thursday, May 14, 1998
Gil Amelio
On The Firing Line
While both were stories we already knew, those who opted to skip the last episode of Seinfeld and listen to Gil Amelio on May 14th got more surprises than the couch potatoes. Much like the final episode of America's favorite sitcom, Amelio's discussion of his tenure at Apple was painful and sometimes downright embarrassing, but had more substance.
Amelio cast himself as a latter day Bard of Cupertino in launching his book recounting his 500 fateful days at Apple Computer. Like a Shakespearean tragedy, Amelio, Jobs and the characters in his book are doomed from the start because of who they are. Free will cannot wrench them from their fatalistic path. The text, however, is more likely to fit the syllabus of a business course than graduate English.
There were red flags a'plenty before he made his pitch to become CEO. Like the Christmas of 1995, when Apple dropped prices and shifted boxes but then discovered it had negative margins on those boxes. Any company without the data to work this out ahead of time is indeed thinking different.
Pappa Gil wanted to just give those Apple kids a spanking -- they had no discipline, no process. He saw himself as paternal figure: a professor who needed to coach his unruly students. This can't have gone down well with the arrogant brats who wouldn't condescend to compete with the forces of WinTel. Trying to impose discipline and process on something with all the momentum of a bag full of cats was simply too great a task.
Amelio suffered death by a thousand cuts. He was forced to constantly defend non-issues like clothes, attitude, and private airplanes.
However, like the late Diana, Princess of Wales he doth protest too much: why court the attention? Where was a good PR manager to keep him out of trouble since he was admittedly inexperienced at managing the media?
Fundamentally, Amelio had the best of intentions and the right ideas to put Apple back on track, but execution was lacking. He was just too nice a guy to give Apple's top management the pink slips they deserved and bring in a new team. His whole business style reflects a different age when a handshake and a term plan was enough to settle executive compensation. The company responded by jumping through every loophole he left open.
The result was an inability to capitalize on the key assets that had sustained Apple up until the holes in the balance sheet could no longer be plugged by Generally Abused Accounting Principles. A fanatical customer base, huge brand recognition and more goodwill within the industry than seems possible now were just some of those assets.
Amelio's book surprises most in that shareholders, executive officers, board members and Wall St. seemed almost willfully unaware of the company's core problems. Overall, Amelio's experience reads like an extreme example of the management philosophy that suggests you give a job to the person who will grow the most by taking it on.
(c) 1998 Francesca Gutierrez and Mathew Lodge
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