Leadership Styles and Challenges Faced by Apple Inc.

ASSESSMENT 3

Table of Contents
Case: Company Background...........................................................................................................3
Situation: Challenge.........................................................................................................................4
Change desired.................................................................................................................................4
Leadership styles.............................................................................................................................5
Conclusion.......................................................................................................................................5
References........................................................................................................................................6

Case: Company Background
Apple Inc. had been founded in the year by three collaborators namely Steve Wozniak, Steve
Jobs and Ronald Wayne. The company had been established and founded with the sole objective
and intention of selling their Apple 1 Personal Computer which was hand-built by Wozniak. This
personal computer had, back at that time, barely qualified as a finished product which eventually
lacked many built-in Human Interface Devices such as keyboard, or even a case. Regardless of
all these shortcomings, the computer eventually attracted the attention of the millionaire Mike
Markkula. Eventually the first Macintosh (Mac) had been designed and with the initial ground
breaking advertisement, Apple had set itself apart from the many competitor firms that had been
targeted in the field of advertisement such as the IBM (Allurwar et al,. 2016). Mac had been a
revolution in the field of personal computer design. This system came with its own Graphical
User Interface (GUI) and also enabled the users to use a built-in “mouse”. Steve Jobs had
effectively improvised a focus on the consumer marketing with respect to product development
to which he had suggested the selling price of Macintosh at 1000 USD in the 1984 currency. Due
to this reason and his eccentricity, he had been restricted from taking a lead role in the company
and eventually he had resigned in the year 1985 (Khan et al,. 2015). After this had been proven
that the High Right policy went unsustainable, the company initiated yet again to introduce
products for its customers such as The Mac Classic, the LC and the latter released Performa
budget series wherein the latter failed miserably due to the inexplicable approach towards
consumer-market electronics.
With the intervention in the world of mobile accessories and telecommunication, the sole
objective of the company had shifted from personal computers to mobile devices with the
introduction of iPhone and iPad that quickly attracted the mainstream consumer market. The
Apple Inc. was not the first company to introduce smart phones wherein Blackberry already
seized considerable amount of the market share long before Apple. With the periodic
improvements in their user interface and the introduction of built-in music player options and
cloud storage facility, Apple Inc. was fast enough to grab hold of the larger consumer forum in
the highly competitive market.