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Apple Updates Corporate Bylaws on Diversity Following Criticism Over Lack of Female Leaders
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I'm a male postgraduate student in the process of filing a gender discrimination suit against a predominantly feminist art history department faculty at my university. Affirmative action and race / gender quotas have only excluded white males.
It boils down to over-regulation leading to mediocrity. But it has also hurt me and affected my life tremendously. Growing up in the ultra-leftist San Francisco Bay Area, as a white male I was actually at the bottom of the race / gender totem pole. So I don't have any empathy whatsoever for anyone who claims victim status, and am only filing a discrimination lawsuit because I was truly discriminated against by feminazi professors and have to get out of the programme.
So let me see if I follow here. You're a white male in a post graduate degree program and you are being held back by feminazis.
That is exactly the thought process that leads to unfair hiring practices.
So, if everyone on the board where women and non - white males , you would still believe that only the best qualified where hired?
Somehow I doubt that.
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You forgot to add the /sarcarsm...I hope.
You lack a basic grasp of a publicly held corporation CEO's primary responsibility - returning value to shareholders. Without shareholders having funded the company there would be NO APPLE.
Product innovation, cutting edge marketing, great retail experience are the "how you get the return" - not the end point.
Steve drove innovation and game changers - Cook, not so much.
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I'm both - a real Apple fanboi 4 sure. Not a Tim Cook admirer though.
Nor will I take Roger Martin's perspective on it. You state the rest will follow. Here we are 15+ months since AAPL was at $702 and the stock price is still $157 off that peak. My comments are from a shareholder perspective. My returns from AAPL were outstanding while under Steve's reign. Cook is coasting and is getting tied up in issues that are not propelling Apple forward. AAPL UNDERPERFORMED the averages this past year. All the products have been refreshed and the market still shows little confidence in Apple under Cook.
There are many possible reasons and it doesn't suggest that boards should be mandated to have a certain percentage of women or any other group (which are actually serious proposals in some European countries). Perhaps well-run companies do a better job of identifying qualified women for board memberships and executive positions. Perhaps a "diverse" board and/or executive team more representative of an entity's customer base keeps the company more responsive.
In any case, I don't think Apple or any other company should be pushed to establish a quota. That said, I can see why they are making the change to their bylaws. From 1997-2011, Apple was an extension of Steve Jobs. He had a lot more control than most CEOs, and the board was not particularly independent. Strictly as a model of corporate governance, Apple was not very good at all. However, it didn't matter because Steve Jobs was just that good. Since Apple now has a more traditional CEO, it makes sense that they adopt better governance practices.
Returning value to shareholders is taking the long view of things, that adds actual value to shareholders not what AAPL closes at today.
Affirmative action doesn't require businesses to hire X amount of Asians, black people, or Samoans per Y amount of white people. The quotas are all but a myth usually perpetrated by people who don't understand how it works. At its most basic, what AA does is insures a person normally discriminated against in the workplace has the same rights to a job and a living as anyone.
Like if you're a well qualified black dude who's been itching for a high paying job, but keep getting passed in favor of less qualified white dudes, then you probably have an AA case. But on the flip side of that, they're not gonna hire you just because you're black. That's not what AA does.
In my country they tried everything: from heavy subsidizing female students' admissions to even building an only-female computer science school (no admission to male students). How it went? Most girls were simply not interested in a career path in computer science, or at least not as interested as in other career paths.
Just hiring white old dudes means you are highly unlikely to be hiring the best person for the job.
$702 was arguably a bubble. Apple was around $325 when Tim Cook took over as "interim" CEO in early 2011 and around $400 when he was named permanent CEO later that year. Now it's around $545 (it was around $570 on Christmas Eve but swooned along with Samsung the last week of the year). We'll see what happens on 1/21/14 when they release earnings and their forecast for the next quarter.
In any case, measured by that yardstick, Apple is basically a market performer under Cook. It significantly overperformed in 2011 and early 2012 (probably somewhat of a speculative bubble), and lagged from mid-2012 to mid-2013, returning to a market performer in late 2013.
The thing is, once a company is as valuable and profitable as Apple, it's hard to sustain the same kind of growth volume. The oil companies have boom-and-bust cycles but over time are like utilities. Microsoft hit a peak in 2000 and is still only around half that now. Samsung may be at that point now. Google is still only about 3/4 as valuable as Apple, though they are still growing at a decent clip. We'll see what happens to them over the next few years.
The right question is not how has Apple has fared under Tim Cook compared with Steve Jobs (though there were definitely years under Steve Jobs where they lagged the market). It is how they have fared under Tim Cook compared with how they would have fared with someone else, or how they would fare in the future with someone else. Anyone other CEO would have to deal with Samsung, Google/Moto, Amazon, and, increasingly, regulators (witness the anti-trust suit, which may be directly attributable to decisions taken by Steve Jobs, not Tim Cook). Is there anyone who would have done/will do a better job than Tim Cook? It's hard to say. Look at how long it is taking Microsoft to find a CEO. Lots of potential candidates have taken themselves out of the running.
Nonsense. Follow the link to the Forbes article. If Jack Welch says it's nonsense, then it's nonsense. The primary responsibility of a corporation is to do what its stated goals at the time of incorporation are. Even if "returning value to shareholders" was the primary responsibility, both the most unsuccessful and the most successful companies have proven that using this as a short term strategy is disastrous, and that putting customers first, employees second, and shareholders a long long distant third, will actually produce the best results for everybody.
Actually, in some European countries have put in place explicit quotas for board representation.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/18/germany-women-quota_n_4294795.html
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10000872396390443696604577645470530827882
And yet in Iran in 1999 40% of CS graduates were women - http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/software-engineer/it-gender-gap-where-are-the-female-programmers/.
Bloody nonsense. If instead of picking the best ten candidates out of 100 white males you manage to pick the best ten candidates out of 100 white males, 30 females and 20 members of some minority, surely you will get better candidates? And if for some reason you kept these 30 women and 20 minority members away and one of the them was the most qualified person, then you _didn't_ hire the most qualified one, did you?
True. Track academic and professional achievement over time, and as a whole, girls and women outperform boys and men until about age 30, at which point men start outachieving. For a variety of reasons, women do more of the child raising (and of course 100% of the child bearing).
Unfortunately, that's a difficult message to deliver. I think it even came up during one of the presidential debates in 2012. But since it doesn't have an "easy" solution it is usually ignored.
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Of course, there is also garbage data like the oft-cited World Economic Forum's general equality study, which ranks Cuba higher than the US, UK, and Canada, in part because Cuba has a higher percentage of women in its "parliament" (never mind that the parliament doesn't do anything, and that Cuba achieves "equality" primarily by keeping everyone down).
S&P 500 board members apparently have an average age of 68 - http://www.pwc.com/us/en/corporate-...-newsletter/august-2013-issues-in-focus.jhtml. So yeah, they are mostly old.
Because society is still sexist.
Communism generally has a pretty good record on sexual equality. That said your Cuba point about their parliament doesn't really counter my point about Iranian CS graduates. If Iran is a backwards country it only makes it more embarrassing that Western countries can't match it's CS graduation rate.
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Of course. But there's a good chance they aren't an old white male as is typical for US board members.
Wrong, wrong and wrong. Apple's high performance returns were related to the market changing products that Steve propelled during his tenure. Results under Cook for the first year or so were still based on what Steve's leadership developed and implemented. As time goes on we see what Cook is capable of or not - and the market is NOT impressed. Apple, from an investor ROI perspective, is morphing into a Microsoft
