The ceo doesn’t have to be a product person. He or she simply needs to be able to manage things. Besides be careful what you wish for.
The notion that someone else can come in, be a product guy and have a Steve Jobs aura about him is far fetched. There’s too many sharks at top to allow that kind of thing now.
Yep. Bean counters in a company (and publicly traded ownership) can make it hard to be innovative unless you have that certain and inimitable credibility of a founder or co-founder, or their direct blessing. There's fiduciary responsibility and then there's acknowledgment of what has made a company great in the first place (and that's never primarily about ability to count beans even if that chore is key to keeping the lights on in the place).
Cook has doubtless known how Steve Jobs assessed other key creative people in the shop when they ran it together. He may or may not have agreed, and one could reasonably question whether Cook ever had the design chops to validate his own assessments of designers. However, an astute manager can tell who's an innovator and who's a wannabe after awhile, who's a team contributor and who's running a self-elevation agenda. Also, if Tim Cook did figure Steve Jobs had his key employees pegged right, it's still true that both people and circumstances -- markets, the competition, the backdrop for new products-- have changed over the time since Cook became CEO. And then and not least there's the matter of how other key employees or now former employees viewed Cook's ascendancy and how that has affected their interactions and Apple as a whole.
Going forward, who knows how Cook and some of those other relied-upon senior employees will manage to nurture in-house talent or seek it from outside. Good design of hardware and software and in particular their integration all seem pretty much in the DNA of Apple by now though, so I'd expect that to color their search whenever they go outside Apple for new hires.
By that I mean the bean counters may prevail in the end on some detail of a product, but not in the hiring process as related to assessment of ability to innovate and integrate design and functionality. So, I'd expect Apple has a good chance of continuing to attract good designers as well as good engineers.
As far as Isaacson's occasional piping up with some previously unpublished tidbit from his interviews with Jobs or others at Apple, I'd chalk half of that up to hoping to keep his book and name in front of readers and his publisher (or a publisher). Personally I enjoyed reading his bio of Steve Jobs but it's not like I read it with the level of attention I'd expend on some textbook for a college course, and I'm no fanatic about having my second-hand and third-hand understanding of Steve Jobs honed even more as time goes on.
Everything's a snapshot taken from a moving train when it comes to content of interviews included in biographies. If I were working for Tim Cook today maybe I'd have memorized Isaacson's book long before now. But as a consumer of Apple gear and an owner of a miniscule piece of Apple the company.... shrug.... "so Tim Cook's not a product person? Per the late Steve Jobs according to his biographer Walter Isaacson? Great. Please pass the salt and pepper."
For Isaacson to say now that Steve Jobs said at some moment in time that Tim Cook was not a product person, what the heck does that mean anyway. Steve Jobs was a lot of things including both creative and arrogant. Without Cook's understanding of product at the level of supply chain, Apple would have gone under while being run the way it was before they lured Cook away from Compaq. Steve Jobs knew Cook was worth his weight in gold. His saying anything dismissive about Cook was doubtless "Steve Jobs being Steve Jobs". His appointment of Cook as CEO, however, was Steve Jobs looking after Apple's future. He wasn't picking a bean counter, and that's not what Cook is.
