Google CEO Eric Schmidt
Apple’s Board of Directors is meeting next Tuesday to discuss possible replacements for Google CEO Eric Schmidt, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Schmidt resigned two weeks ago because of increased competition between Google and Apple. One of the leading candidates to replace him is Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook, who has acted as CEO during Steve Jobs’s medical leave. Cook has ben praised for Apple’s performance during Jobs’s absence, and is tipped as his successor. But as the Journal notes:
The board has been criticized for a lack of independence from Mr. Jobs. Half of the company’s six outside directors have served for at least a decade, which some governance experts say is too long to maintain their independence from the CEO of a company.
“The biggest danger is that the board will be unable to truly take the perspective of the shareholder and will feel beholden to the CEO or unwilling to confront the CEO,” says David Nadler, a corporate governance specialist with Oliver Wyman Consulting.
Independence from the CEO has not been one of the characteristics of Apple’s board in recent history. Jobs had most of the board replaced shortly after he returned to the company in 1997, and since then has recruited friends and allies like former vice president Al Gore or Oracle CEO Larry Ellison.
Whoever the board chooses to replace Schmidt, it is not going to be someone antagonistic to Jobs.
As CoM’s Pete Mortensen has noted, the current board is light on tech folks, but because of Apple’s wide-ranging businesses interests (from cell phones to online media), there’s not a lot of people in the Valley Apple’s not in competition with. Pete likes John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems. “He’s an incredibly bright guy, a brilliant manager, and he really gets tech and telecommunications without being an Apple competitor in any meaningful sense. Additionally, he has a reputation for remarkable ethics, both personally and across his organization — Cisco was one of the only organizations in Silicon Valley that didn’t have stock backdating issues a few years back. He also gets business customers in a big way.”
