Friday quick hits 3: Steve Jobs’s health.
Debated with myself whether to write about this, but then my friend Gini Dietrich said it better than I could have — and from the perspective of a P.R. pro:
Should Apple Have Disclosed Jobs’s Liver Transplant?
. . . I disagree that Apple and its board think Jobs’s health is a private matter. He has made himself a public figure synonymous with the brand; he is the face of the company. Many believe his health is instrumental in the stock performance of the company. While the U.S. has strict medical privacy laws, Jobs’s role as the company’s visionary trumps his right to privacy.
What she said — Apple could have done this much better.
Related story on this topic:
And three more posts from the archives:
- Steve Jobs’s health: a brief note. (28 July 2008)
- Banking on the founder’s mojo.
- Steve Jobs, rock star.
~
Category: Executives, MediaIf you liked this post, please consider subscribing to the RSS feed so you can receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.
7 Comments so far
Leave A Comment
Hey thanks for the ping! Since I wrote the post, the Journal wrote a story about how he essentially bought his liver. Sigh…so much fodder for a man i actually really respect. Great visionary, terrible communicator.
Yuck. No way. Putting yourself out there as a public figure, even making yourself synonymous with a brand that you’ve taken most of your life to build, does not entail signing away your right to privacy when you want some privacy for health reasons.
We don’t own the celebrities who entertain us, and we don’t own the people who run the companies in which we own shares. This is just basic human decency. It’s nasty business to be putting “shareholder concerns” ahead of that.
The company said 100% of what was appropriate for shareholders to know and not one word more: he’s not here. He’s on medical leave. Not coming in to work. We expect him back by [date].
In this case, I believe he was even back to work slightly before the original estimate, no?
[I'd happily make this same argument for some thieving Wall Street douchebag if it's in regard to legitimate medical leave, so Apple fanboy accusations don't apply even if I technically am one.]
Rob — I take your point, but I can’t agree with you, at least not all the way.
Let’s play pretend: what if Mr. CEO X caught syphilis? I would *not* expect him or the company to come out and say that it was syphilis. I wouldn’t want them to. He goes to the hospital, and when anyone asks about it, the company says something about “He contracted an infection, but the doctors have it under control and we expect him back to work in a week. Nothing serious, and no reason to be alarmed.” And then he is back to work in a week. Fine — and I don’t need to know that it was syphilis, much less how he contracted it.
But what if Mr. CEO has stage-3 cancer? You don’t *then* say “He contracted an infection . . .” etc. — because you wouldn’t be dealing with the situation in an open way.
That’s essentially what Jobs & Apple did here. He had serious health issues which were cast as minor, then recast as a bit less minor, but which were, in fact, actively life-threatening. That’s a *material* change in the situation from the point of all stakeholders in Apple.
Where I agree with you: I don’t believe that if I buy some shares — or even a lot of shares — in a company, that I suddenly have the right to rifle through the CEO’s health records. But if the CEO’s life is in danger? In a company that has taken the CEO’s mojo to the bank, over and over and over? Yes, at *some* point I have a right to know that . . . and not months after the fact.
Tim – it’s obviously not a B&W thing so it seems to me the central question is how much any executive is id’d with the company in a MATERIAL way. Apple has re-built itself around innovation and it has re-built it’s innovation around, at the very least, the mythology that Jobs is the beating heart of it. When there’s a major plant fire, a supplier bankruptcy, a distribution breakdown that’s material and fiduciary obligations mean that the info was required to be disclosed. NOW that all said what would’ve happened if they disclosed this two years ago ? Given the obligations as argued the maneuver may still have been arguably the right thing to do from the company’s point of view. Of course from a trader’s point of view what a great missed opportunity.
Agreed, Dave — and you did a better job of saying what I was trying to say.
Rob — I’m with Dave in this respect: I believe it’s not a black-and-white issue of privacy-respected vs. privacy-violated. It’s a judgment call about material vs. non-material in the business sense.
Whose judgment? An SEC regulatory type? A judge? Who gets to say definitively that Steve Jobs is of x more value to Apple than, say, Jeffrey Immelt is to GE? I’m not hearing much to persuade me to change my original perspective on this.
A major plant fire? Material.
A supplier bankruptcy. Material.
A medical leave of one week? Material.
A medical leave of six months to a year? Material.
Reason for (either) medical leave? Personal.
I think it’s reasonable to expect a company to provide an honest estimate as to when someone will return from leave, but that’s really all the info any investor should need or ask for.
Now, I can definitely appreciate that this specific example is more complex because it appears that Apple/Jobs made deliberately misleading statements. That’s another ball of wax.
But regarding the baseline for business/market ethics, I think it’s an issue that they felt compelled to make specific statements at all.
Rob — If it helps, I’m not talking about Apple’s legal requirement to do anything. I’m sure they have very good lawyers who could make very, very good arguments in court that they followed legal requirements to the letter. What I am talking about is the *right* thing to do.
The “deliberately misleading statements” part is what’s most germane here, at least from my perspective. What it boils down to: I wouldn’t want to *force* them to disclose personal medical issues, but I definitely think that Apple *should* have been more forthcoming about how sick Jobs was.