Introduction
Successful organizations are built through effective leadership, which stimulates a firm’s ability to outperform its competitors and accomplish its long–term growth strategies. Apple Inc., a globally renowned technology multinational, magnified the vital importance of visionary, adaptive, and strategic management in creating and fully exploiting the potential of a business. Following rapidly declining sales and loss of market niche, Steve Jobs returned to Apple Inc. and spearheaded aggressive transformations, which saw the company become the world’s most valuable in market capitalization (Heracleous & Papachroni, 2013). Additionally, the firm has been ranked as the foremost innovative entity, transcending the obstacles which characterize the computer industry. Apple Inc.’s remarkable turnaround has been attributed to Steve’s ambitious, inspirational, and effective leadership abilities, which fostered creativity, innovation, and change. Although Apple Inc.’s transformational leadership exerted monumental pressure on employees, it was highly effective in intensifying managerial effectiveness, establishing competitive advantages, and creating concrete growth strategies.
Effectiveness of Apple Inc.’s Leadership
Apple Inc.’s current success can be attributed to the organization’s effective management and leadership abilities to quickly adapt to a highly dynamic business environment. Upon returning to the company in 1997, Steve Jobs dropped 70% of the diverse products which he deemed redundant and expensive and intensified the organization’s focus on manufacturing better, customer-oriented goods (Heracleous & Papachroni, 2013). In the face of declining business fortunes’, an adaptive and strategic leader was required to identify the existing challenges, anticipate opportunities, and convert the opportunities to avenues of gaining competitive advantage. According to Rahman et al. (2018), effective leadership integrates the ability to make decisions in the short term, which guarantees the organization’s long–term viability. For instance, Steve’s plan to abandon some poorly performing or redundant products was an operational resolve informed by a comprehensive evaluation of internal and external factors. Ultimately, the CEO was delighted at what Apple Inc. was engaged in as well as what the company dropped, highlighting the ability to decipher potential growth points and the firm’s deadweight. Thus, Steve Job’s leadership was highly effective as manifested by Apple Inc.’s turnaround.
Additionally, Steve Job’s leadership amplified the indispensability of innovation if Apple Inc. was to go beyond working for survival to becoming a revered and profitable entity. For instance, combining technological advancements and distinctive designs in the production of iMac, revolutionized desktop computing. In subsequent years, Job’s transformational leadership was instrumental in stimulating innovation, including the development of the iconic iPod, which dominated the MP3 music player market segment (Heracleous & Papachroni, 2013). This implies that the adaptive managerial approach was influential in fostering creativity, both at individual and organizational levels. Indeed, establishing an engaging and sustainable culture, which energizes the commitment and devotion of talented people, is predicated on an enabling management approach. Afsar and Umrani (2019) argue that transformational leadership positively influences employees’ innovative work behavior. Considering how Apple Inc. was successful in steering innovation as a key business driver, it is evident that the firm’s leadership was immensely effective.
Basis of Apple Inc.’s Competitive Advantage and Potential Challenges
Apple’s basis of its competitive advantage arose from the leadership’s ability to strategically utilize resources and effectively tap into the workforce’s capability to develop unique products. This implies that Apple’s current market position has been significantly influenced by the application of appropriate and supportive leadership, which supported the maximum exploitation of the company’s potential through innovation. While Steve Jobs was not an engineer or a programmer, his devotion to creating unique products strictly aligned to the preset standards of excellence, user-friendliness, and simplicity became Apple Inc.’s catalyst for the turnaround.
Additionally, the commitment to distinctiveness differentiated the company’s operational objectives, by emphasizing the creation of outstanding products, providing customers with an exceptional experience, and assuming responsibility for what they delivered to the market. Consequently, special emphasis was given to excellent performance, with Steve Jobs rendering high praise in recognition of remarkable effort as well as criticism intended to encourage harder efforts (Heracleous & Papachroni, 2013). Ultimately, Steve’s expertise in combining his strategic vision with customers’ expectations facilitated the full exploitation of the employees’ potential, resulting in the generation of Apple Inc.’s innovative competitive advantage.
Apple Inc.’s competitive advantage is innovation and the company hires exclusively talented personnel to create inventive, industry-disrupting and groundbreaking products. According to de Conto et al. (2016), innovation as a competitive advantage and survival strategy exert monumental pressure on the firm’s resources due to the frequent demand to present something unique or improved to consumers. Notably, yesterday’s innovations are already challenged by today’s developments and may be displaced by tomorrow’s creativity. As a result, the company should invest heavily in recruiting and retaining highly skilled staff and devote disproportionate resources to research and development, which negatively impacts the revenue margins. Additionally, such a strategy, although seeking to capitalize on the first-mover advantages, exposes the company to significant pioneering costs and risks. Therefore, the company’s bottom lines may be affected or exposed to more vulnerabilities than an entity pursuing a different competitive strategy.
Potential Growth Strategies for Apple
Apple Inc.’s current growth strategy focuses on product development while according lower priority to market development and penetration. This indicates that the company can still exploit additional options to develop and enhance its competitive advantage in the consumer electronics, information technology, and services segment. For instance, Apple Inc. has no elaborate focus on any particular market segment. The prevailing market-wide emphasis may fail to capture the specific needs of a given and potentially profitable niche. In this regard, Apple Inc. can identify and target a narrower range of consumers and fully exploit it than implement a single approach across all markets. Additionally, the company can optimize the differentiation strategy to penetrate traditionally abandoned markets, such as developing countries, and other emerging markets with tremendous growth potential. Ultimately, such an approach would enable the entity to effectively compete with competitors like Samsung who have invested considerably in those markets.
Conclusion
Conclusively, today’s highly competitive and dynamic business environment presents unconventional challenges. Establishing an organization’s sustainable competitive advantage is primarily driven by effective leadership. This implies that appropriate managerial approaches are critical pillars that determine the survival, profitability, or extinction of an entity. The result-driven leadership enables the accurate recognition of the problematic areas, nurtures the talents and strengths of the workforce, and inspires commitment to exceptional performance. Steve Jobs’s visionary and transformational leadership enables him to identify that Apple needed a sustainable innovative culture to turn around the dwindling business fortunes. Moreover, pinpointing a particular strategy and pursuing it exhaustively can potentially differentiate a business from competitors and provide momentum for growth. However, utilizing an innovative plan as a competitive advantage exerts pressure on business operations due to the demand for unique or improved market offerings. Apple Inc.’s current growth strategy, which primarily focuses on product and market development, can be augmented by narrowing down on specific market segments and developing products that can effectively compete in the developing countries.
References
Afsar, B., & Umrani, W. A. (2019). Transformational leadership and innovative work behavior: The role of motivation to learn, task complexity, and innovation culture. European Journal of Innovation Management, 23(3), 402–428. Web.
de Conto, S. M., Junior, J. A. V., & Vaccaro, G. L. R. (2016). Innovation as a competitive advantage issue: A cooperative study on an organic juice and wine producer. Gestao & Producao, 23(2), 397–407. Web.
Heracleous, L., & Papachroni, A. (2013). Strategic leadership and innovation at Apple Inc. Practicing Strategy: Text and cases edition (2nd Edition), pp.680–685. Sage Publisher
Rahman, N. R. A., Othman, M. Z. F., Yajid, M. S. A., & Rahman, S. F. A. (2018). Impact of strategic leadership on organizational performance, strategic orientation, and operational strategy.Management Science Letters, 8(12), 1387–1398. Web.