This September, Tim Prepare dinner is stepping down because the CEO of Apple after almost 15 years. Prepare dinner will hand the function over to John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice chairman of {hardware} engineering.
Prepare dinner shared his ideas about his successor in a community letter. In it, he known as Ternus, “a superb engineer and thinker who has spent the previous 25 years constructing the Apple merchandise our customers love a lot, obsessive about each element, targeted on each potential means we are able to make one thing higher, bolder, extra stunning, and extra significant.” He added that Ternus “is the right particular person for the job.”
Except for Prepare dinner’s personal religion in Ternus to take over his function, the succession is sensible given Ternus’ 25 years of expertise on the firm. However the transfer can be a predictable one given new analysis on succession. In accordance with international management advisory and govt search agency Egon Zehnder’s latest 2026 Succession examine, which examined 500 international CEO appointments, CEOs will not be usually exterior hires. The report discovered {that a} whopping 82% of CEOs had been appointed from inside their organizations over the previous decade. Most CEOs (84%) come into the function as first-timers.
Amongst first time CEO’s, 88% had been promoted internally. Nevertheless virtually half (49%) of skilled CEOs got here from exterior of the corporate, which suggests corporations look exterior of their organizations after they’re in search of to alter instructions. Ternus’s promotion suggests Apple is to planning to remain the course moderately than searching for a radically new imaginative and prescient. Morgan Stanley analysts agree, writing that the succession displays Apple’s “emphasis on product on the middle of the flywheel will stay.”
The analysis additionally discovered that CEOs who’re promoted from inside usually final barely longer within the function, too. Exerternally appointed CEOs have a median tenure of 73 months (six years and one month). Those that are appointed from inside common tenure of 82.43 months (six years and 10 months).
Given Prepare dinner’s personal profession path, the transfer looks as if an intuitive one. The tech chief was employed by Steve Jobs in 1998, earlier than being promoted to govt vice chairman of worldwide gross sales in 2002, after which to COO in 2005. Prepare dinner took over Job’s function as CEO in 2011, after having already labored on the firm for 13 years.
