After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul
by Tripp Mickle, May 3, 2022
Who
Tripp Mickle is a tech journalist for The New York Times, focusing on Apple and industry trends like Tech and AI. He previously worked at The Wall Street Journal and began his career covering the Olympics. He authored After Steve, a book detailing Apple’s evolution under Tim Cook after Steve Jobs’ death. Tripp holds degrees from Wake Forest and Columbia University, and he is committed to ethical journalism, prioritizing fairness and transparency while avoiding conflicts of interest. Born in Charlotte, NC, he now resides in San Francisco.
He is an accomplished journalist who has spent years covering Apple, the tech industry, and Silicon Valley for The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. With an eye for corporate dynamics and an insider’s view on the tech world, Mickle has a deep understanding of the industry’s major players and trends. His career highlights include:
Technology Journalist: Mickle has reported extensively on major tech companies, providing a clear-eyed analysis of the strategies, leadership decisions, and internal challenges at companies like Apple and Google.
Silicon Valley Reporter: His experience covering Silicon Valley gives him a nuanced perspective on the cultural and business shifts happening in the world’s most influential tech hub.
Book Summary:
After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul by Tripp Mickle provides an in-depth look at Apple’s evolution in the years following Steve Jobs’ death, focusing on the contrasting leadership styles of two pivotal figures: Tim Cook, who became Apple’s CEO, and Jony Ive, the Chief Design Officer. The book paints a rich narrative of how the operational, efficiency-driven mindset of Cook led Apple to unprecedented financial success, while Ive’s design-centric vision clashed with the company’s increasing shift toward profitability over creativity. Ive is portrayed like a good evil who prefered the status quo where innovation would rule over the “fiduciary-profit making” role Cooks adopted with his approach.
The book begins by revisiting the final years of Jobs’ reign, during which he not only revolutionized Apple’s product lineup but also imbued the company with a relentless commitment to innovation or lucky stubborn leadership at the right time. When Tim Cook took over, his expertise in managing supply chains and operations propelled Apple to new financial heights, numbers became important, ultimately making it the world’s first trillion-dollar company. However, Mickle reveals how, in the pursuit of maximizing shareholder value, Apple gradually drifted from the creative and design-first philosophy that had defined it under Jobs. This is maybe why he mentions that Apple loss its soul. Is tha true? what is the basic instinc of a profit organisation?
As Mickle examines the post-Jobs era, the book spotlights the tension between Tim Cook and Jony Ive—two figures who personified the conflict between operational efficiency and design innovation. Ive, who had been instrumental in creating iconic products like the iPhone, grew increasingly disillusioned as Apple’s focus shifted away from groundbreaking hardware to more pragmatic, profit-driven services and product updates. His eventual departure from Apple in 2019 signaled a cultural shift within the company, one that many Apple veterans and loyalists lamented as the "loss of its soul."
This may be missleading and confusing as Apple needed to mature that way to also reinforced the operation backbone it needed to deliver to the tribe or cult created by Steve and Jony. To put it simply Apple got the parental supervision it needed to grow.
Mickle presents this narrative with a wealth of insider accounts and interviews, revealing how Apple’s internal dynamics changed over time. He also contextualizes the company’s transformation within the broader tech industry, offering insights into how Apple responded to evolving market pressures and consumer demands. The book is a vivid (intense conversations and harsh language) exploration of leadership, corporate culture, and the often-turbulent relationship between creativity and operational success.
Book Review:
Tripp Mickle’s After Steve is a meticulously researched and deeply insightful look at Apple’s evolution in the post-Steve Jobs era, painting a vivid picture of how the company transitioned from innovation-led to operationally-driven. At the heart of this book lies the dichotomy between Tim Cook’s calculated and disciplined leadership and Jony Ive’s artistic, visionary approach to design. Mickle deftly explores how these two opposing philosophies clashed and, ultimately, shaped the trajectory of Apple as it grew into a trillion-dollar giant.
One of the book’s greatest strengths is its nuanced portrayal of both Cook and Ive, neither of whom are simplified into heroes or villains. Mickle allows readers to understand how Cook’s sharp focus on efficiency and shareholder value ensured Apple’s financial success but at the cost of losing some of the creative spark that defined the Jobs era. On the other hand, Ive’s frustrations with the company's shift away from product innovation provide a poignant commentary on the internal struggles that emerged as Apple became more corporate.
Through a blend of interviews, insider accounts, and behind-the-scenes stories, Mickle reveals how Apple’s cultural and strategic transformation mirrors broader trends in the tech industry, where profitability often takes precedence over visionary risk-taking. While the book offers valuable insights into leadership and corporate strategy, it also captures the sense of loss felt by Apple’s design purists, who yearned for the innovative magic of the Jobs-Ive era.
Despite these compelling insights, the book could benefit from a deeper dive into the broader technology landscape to provide more context on how Apple’s competitors navigated similar transitions. Additionally, the narrative leans heavily on the contrast between Cook and Ive, which, while engaging, sometimes overshadows other critical voices within the company. It also missed on showing that companies need at one point to grow out of the start-up cycle. While fun an chaotic, it is not sustainable if talents are aging and society is looking into your culture as a company. In addition, a publicly traded company has some obligation towards sharehoolders that a private one or a start-up may not have.
The book forget to mention that even Steve Jobs required not to ask what Steve would do and he is the one who put his trust in to Tim Cook. While behind the source of the chaos, Steve may have realize that things need to change in the good direction.
Overall, After Steve is a fascinating and balanced look at the challenges and trade-offs Apple faced as it transitioned from a design-driven innovator to a global corporate juggernaut. For anyone interested in leadership, business strategy, or the tech industry, this book offers both a celebration of Apple’s triumphs and a sobering reflection on the costs of prioritizing profits over creativity.
Practical and Technical Benefits for Project Managers:
Practical Benefits:
Balancing Operational Efficiency and Innovation: The book highlights the critical challenge of maintaining innovation while scaling operations. Project managers can apply lessons from Tim Cook’s approach to improving processes and efficiency without sacrificing the creative input of their teams.
Managing Cross-Functional Teams: Mickle’s account of Apple’s internal struggles demonstrates the importance of communication and alignment between operational and creative teams, a key skill for any project manager overseeing multidisciplinary projects.
Navigating Leadership Transitions: The book provides an example of how to manage leadership changes and shifts in organizational focus, which project managers can draw from when dealing with internal restructuring or shifts in strategic priorities.
Technical Benefits:
Optimizing Processes for Scalability: Tim Cook’s operational expertise demonstrates how fine-tuning supply chains, workflows, and resource management can lead to greater scalability without compromising on quality—a valuable lesson for project managers overseeing large or growing teams.
Risk Management and Innovation: Project managers can learn from Apple’s transition to more incremental product improvements, understanding how to strike a balance between managing risks and fostering a culture of innovation within their projects.
Building Adaptable Teams: As Apple shifted from a product-focused company to a service-centric business, Mickle shows the importance of adaptability in sustaining long-term success. Project managers can take cues from this to cultivate flexible teams that are ready to pivot based on market and project demands.
In conclusion, After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul is a deeply insightful exploration of one of the most iconic companies in the world during a pivotal time in its history. Tripp Mickle masterfully captures the complex interplay between leadership, innovation, and operational efficiency that defined Apple's post-Steve Jobs transformation. The book’s nuanced portrayal of the contrasting leadership styles of Tim Cook and Jony Ive highlights the delicate balance between business pragmatism and creative vision that companies must navigate as they scale. While Apple’s unprecedented financial success under Cook is undeniable, Mickle shows how this success came with a gradual shift away from the design-driven ethos that once set the company apart.
For anyone fascinated by corporate culture, leadership dynamics, or the evolution of the tech industry, After Steve offers an engaging and well-researched narrative filled with valuable lessons. It paints a cautionary yet inspiring tale about the costs and rewards of becoming a corporate behemoth in today’s world—shedding light on both the triumphs and compromises that shaped Apple's journey. Ultimately, the book leaves readers contemplating the broader implications of growth, innovation, and identity in the modern business landscape.
