Design is Returning to Power at Apple But Will the Culture Follow?
A sociological approach shows where ideas stall and how ONA can map the path forward
Apple has the money. The talent. The R&D budget. Its structure is widely lauded as a model for innovation. And yet, quarter after quarter, the energy that once sparked customer intrigue seems harder to find.
iPhones now launch to curiosity rather than obsession. Siri still lags competitors. Even Vision Pro, backed by an estimated $20 billion, has yet to gain traction. Overall, sales are softening. Enthusiasm is, too.
It’s easy to blame product choices or macro conditions. But the deeper story may be cultural. Not perks or values, but in the social routines, roles, and relationships that shape which ideas take hold and which quietly fade.
And that’s the story to unravel: how Apple’s innovation slowly became eclipsed by operational control. And, more deeply, understand why process efficiency is not the enemy of creative exploration. Though the two require very different conditions to thrive, one for scale and stability and the other on focus and speed, they can succeed together.
History offers a model. Lockheed Martin’s legendary Skunk Works was a closed network by design: small, high-trust, and fast-moving. It thrived because the rest of the company provided an open, scalable infrastructure to carry its breakthroughs forward.
Apple operates much in the same way. At least it used to. While some of the hard-wired routines still exist, what may have been lost is the cultural wiring — the informal trust networks, dissent norms, and design voice that once elevated its ideas. The question now is whether it can be restored.
There’s reason for optimism. In July, Tim Cook announced that design would return to his team following COO Jeff Williams’ retirement. It’s a signal. But structure alone won’t be enough. The real challenge lies in rewiring the culture and in rebuilding the circuits that once protected breakthrough thinking.
Look Past the Headline Numbers
In the 14 years since Tim Cook took the helm, Apple has become a model of operational precision. Headcount has more than doubled, climbing past 164,000. Revenue has grown more than threefold, topping $391 billion in 2024. And Wall Street has rewarded it, with the stock price climbing more than fourfold to over $230.
The numbers undoubtedly impress, and Tim Cook has done the job he was asked to do: scale Apple. The question is what it cost. Revenue slipped in 2016, 2019, and again in 2023. Each dip reflected operational pressures, erosion of design leadership, and a gradual cooling of innovation sentiment. These downturns were not simply the result of macroeconomic shifts. They were company-specific signals that Apple’s cultural momentum was losing some of its original luster.
To understand why, we need to revisit the blueprint Steve Jobs left behind. His system of innovation relied less on hierarchy and more on the interplay of design, engineering, and operations. Jobs protected design as the creative heartbeat, with other functions serving to amplify and stabilize its work. That balance is harder to see today, but it may still be there.
Three Quiet Forces Behind the Decline
Steve Jobs didn’t just build products. He built a system of innovation. Design set the pace. Dissent was protected. Product development moved through a tight loop of intuition, iteration, and trust. Design was the heartbeat, while engineering and operations amplified rather than directed the vision. Jony Ive and, later, Evans Hankey carried that legacy, serving as creative catalysts and cultural glue.
That system did not collapse overnight. But slowly and over time, creative decision-making was pushed into the background. Operational priorities grew louder. Design leadership grew quieter. And the safeguards that once protected bold thinking began to erode.
1. Operational Dominance
Jobs had chosen Tim Cook for a reason. Scale required operational discipline, and Cook delivered. He streamlined supply chains and built Apple into a financial juggernaut. But operational logic has limits. It prizes predictability over ambiguity and measurable gains over intuitive bets. Those instincts, powerful for efficiency, can also narrow the conditions innovation requires.
This operational machine runs on what sociologists call an open network. These networks are wide and redundant, designed to move information across large teams and reduce risk. They excel at stability and scale, and they have been critical to Apple’s success.
Design, however, thrives in a different environment. It depends on closed networks: small, interdisciplinary groups that move quickly, take risks, and trust each other enough to push ideas into untested territory. As process discipline tightened, the space for this kind of exploration shrank. Not by intent, but by design.
2. The Quieting of Design
Design took the brunt of that change. At Apple, it was never the only source of innovation, but it was the symbolic center: the place where intuition met engineering and aesthetics met utility. It worked because it was protected as a closed network woven into the larger fabric. Small teams could move quickly, experiment without scrutiny, and build the trust needed to push ideas forward.
However, that protection began to fade. Since 2019, a series of shifts has steadily thinned design’s influence:
Jony Ive departed, and the Chief Design Officer role was left vacant.
Evans Hankey resigned in 2024, with no successor named.
The design function was folded under the Chief Operating Officer.
Molly Anderson, long seen as a successor, was left off Apple’s executive roster.
Bloomberg reported a continuing exodus of Ive-era designers.
Individually, these moves may have seemed procedural. Together, they signaled a shift of power from design to operations. The closed network that once sparked Apple’s boldest ideas was pulled into an open system designed for scale. What was gained in discipline was lost in creative energy.
3. Growth and the Crisis of Coordination
Apple’s sheer scale magnifies the challenge. What once moved through tight, informal circuits now struggles through layers of hierarchy. Ideas slow. Collaboration stalls. Influence becomes localized. Larry Greiner described this as the “crisis of coordination” that comes with growth. The structure that once enabled precision now makes it harder for creativity to travel.
Each of these shifts, individually, might have weakened design’s role. But together, they compounded. iPhone sales, which account for nearly half of Apple’s revenue, began to decline,. Bloomberg reported a nearly 5% drop during the first quarter of 2025. While Q2 may appear to have rebounded, even Tim Cook noted that the bump was largely tariff-related and not likely to continue.
And that’s the trend of deeper concern: momentum around Apple’s core products is raising fresh concerns about innovative stagnation.
A Possible Turn
That story may now be shifting. In July 2025, Apple announced that Jeff Williams, its longtime COO, will retire. As a result, Tim Cook announced that he would be bring Design back under his oversight. The move restores a direct line between design and the CEO, but it does not yet replace the leadership and cultural weight that has been lost since 2019. It is symbolic, important, but still incomplete.
Tim Cook’s challenge is to protect the two very different systems that once made Apple stand alone in creative design. Its open networks stabilized what had already been built, while its closed networks ignited what came next. That balance is what made Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works legendary.
Side-Bar: Open and closed networks
Apple’s path forward depends on more than shifting reporting lines. It requires restoring the balance between two very different systems.
Open networks are wide and redundant. They move information quickly across large groups, reduce risk, and provide the predictability that scale demands. They are the backbone of Apple’s operational excellence: supply chains, retail networks, and global engineering teams that deliver stability at massive scale.
Closed networks operate differently. They are small, high-trust, and often insular by design. They create the conditions for speed, ambiguity, and breakthrough ideas. Apple’s design team once functioned this way, as a protected circle where dissent was encouraged and intuition had space to spark before process caught up.
Neither system works on its own. Open networks stabilize what has already been built, but they rarely ignite the next leap. Closed networks spark what comes next, but they need open systems to carry their ideas forward. Innovation at scale requires both.
Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works remains the classic example. A closed, fast-moving team delivered breakthrough aircraft like the SR-71 and F-117. They thrived because they were shielded from bureaucracy, yet still plugged into the larger organization that could manufacture, finance, and scale what they created. Skunk Works was proof that a closed network can flourish inside an open one. So long as leadership protects the boundary and the balance.
The Delicate Balance with Operational Discipline
Apple’s innovation challenge isn’t a matter of investment. R&D spending continues to rise, even as a percentage of revenue. The issue lies in the political dynamics of who gets heard and where trust and influence nudge surface-level decisions.
Consider how a product might have emerged during Apple’s design-led era. As Leander Kahney describes in Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products, design, reporting directly to Jobs, led the product’s purpose and user experience from the outset. Their autonomy enabled creative vision to take root before facing operational scrutiny.
That dynamic was never meant to exclude operational discipline. Jobs chose Cook precisely because scale required rigor. But when design leadership faded, so did the counterweight. In an environment optimized for efficiency, creative ideas that once traveled through informal networks may now stall before they surface.
Greiner’s theory warned that scale brings coordination breakdowns. But we can take that idea further: growth doesn’t just challenge systems. It challenges culture.
Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) helps identify where those breaks are happening. It can show which teams remain central, which are structurally (or politically) isolated, and whether functions like design still have a clear path to decision-makers. It can pinpoint where trust has eroded, where bottlenecks form, and which leaders are quietly filtering what gets prioritized or dismissed.
If Apple wanted to reimagine how new products are designed and refined, network analysis could help locate the bottlenecks and identify the right people to carefully and surgically nudge the desired effect. They don’t need to overhaul the company. They just need to realign the system in a way that restores balance between operational excellence and creative influence.
Side-Bar: Diagnosing cultural breakdown
To see the cultural impact of these shifts, Apple needs a different kind of lens. Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) reveals how influence, trust, and decision-making actually work inside a company. It maps the hidden circuits of collaboration and shows where innovation is slowing down.
ONA highlights the informal networks — what many call workplace politics — that decide which ideas advance and which are quietly sidelined. Paired with behavioral economics, it also explains how incentives, norms, and perceived risks steer people toward conformity. Even the best-designed structures will drift if the underlying culture wires people to play it safe.
That drift has real consequences. Apple’s operational discipline has flourished, but its very success has shaped behavior. And behavior, over time, becomes culture.
Restoring the Balance
Once those patterns are visible, change becomes possible. This is not a debate between bold and boring. It is about being fit for purpose. Apple’s culture today optimizes for scale, efficiency, and predictability. The risk is that it does so at the expense of experimentation and creative risk-taking.
Restoring creative momentum does not require undoing operational discipline. It requires rebalancing influence. That might mean elevating creative leadership to the executive team, modeling behaviors that reward experimentation, or creating new pathways for cross-functional trust.
Imagine someone inside Apple tasked with reviving innovation, not at the top of the chart but close enough to shape cross-functional work. Take Molly Anderson, head of industrial design, whose role once carried far greater visibility. She may not have Cook’s ear, but she holds a mandate to unlock creative output.
With ONA, she could map the real story: where collaboration is stuck, which designers are influential across functions, and who can rebuild the bridges between silos. Armed with that knowledge, Anderson could do what structure alone cannot: restore the cultural circuits that make innovation flow.
And so can you, dear reader.
Diagnosing and Rebuilding Fit for Purpose
Strategy does not succeed on structure or talent alone. It depends on cultural fit — the alignment between how an organization is built and the behaviors it rewards. When those signals diverge, behavior follows.
ONA helps catch these shifts early. Paired with behavioral insight, it moves leaders from vague observation to actionable understanding. It complements strategy by showing how to close the gap between vision and execution; a gap that has fueled 70% failure rates in major change efforts since John Kotter first documented them.
This work can feel heavy. Yet the returns are concrete: faster decisions, smoother collaboration, less friction in operations, and stronger retention of top talent. In today’s market, where even the strongest firms face cultural drag, those advantages matter more than ever.
Apple’s Structure Enables But Culture Decides
In 2020, Joel Podolny and Morten Hansen argued in Harvard Business Review that Apple’s functional structure was the foundation of its innovation. And in many ways, it is. Functional design centralizes expertise, strengthens technical rigor, and ensures operational consistency.
But as Apple scaled, that same structure began to suppress exploration. Its creative influence networks — the informal wiring that once carried fragile ideas to decision-makers — began to erode.
Apple remains a masterclass in execution. Yet the systems that once made it daring may be shifting. Innovation has not disappeared, but the cultural infrastructure that protected it has slowly weakened.
With design now returning to the CEO’s purview, Apple may be laying the groundwork for balance to return. Whether that promise materializes depends on more than structure. It depends on whether the cultural circuits that once carried trust and dissent can be reactivated.
The Next Frontier
ONA is not a magic fix. It is a rare view into the hidden machine: where trust lives, where ideas flow, and where energy stalls. Paired with a behavioral lens, it helps leaders see why they have drifted from their purpose even when surface metrics look strong.
Consider where design is headed. Jony Ive, whose imprint defined Apple’s aesthetic for decades, is now collaborating with OpenAI to reimagine how we interact with technology. His firm, LoveFrom, is leading the creative direction for a new generation of AI devices.
In a world increasingly shaped by algorithms and automation, the demand for human-centered design is only growing. Ive’s involvement underscores a truth that goes beyond Apple: innovation does not rest on technical brilliance alone. It requires environments that protect vision, reward curiosity, and give creative voices a seat at the table.
References:
Apple Inc. (2025). Forms 10Q and 10K. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Bloomberg. (2024, May 8). Apple loses another top designer, extending post-Jony Ive exodus. Bloomberg.com. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-08/apple-loses-another-top-designer-extending-post-jony-ive-exodus
Bloomberg. (2023, February 2). Apple is dropping industrial design chief role in post-Jony Ive era. Bloomberg.com. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-02/apple-decides-to-drop-role-of-industrial-design-chief-in-post-jony-ive-era
Bloomberg. (2024, September 22). Apple’s new iPhone 16 reflects slowing pace of innovation. Bloomberg.com. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-09-22/apple-iphone-16-pro-max-review-new-model-reflects-slowing-pace-of-innovation-m1dkn8jv
Harvard Business Review (1998, May-June). Evolution and revolution as organizations grow. HBR.org. https://hbr.org/1998/05/evolution-and-revolution-as-organizations-grow
Harvard Business Review (2020, November-December). How Apple Is Organized for Innovation. HBR.org. https://hbr.org/2020/11/how-apple-is-organized-for-innovation
Harvard Business Review (1995, May-June). Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail. HBR.org. https://hbr.org/1995/05/leading-change-why-transformation-efforts-fail-2
Kahney, L (2013). Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products. Portfolio.
MarketWatch. (2024, April 19). Apple reportedly shuffles AI execs, but it may have a larger problem than ‘Siri-gate’. MarketWatch.com. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/apple-reportedly-shuffles-ai-execs-but-it-may-have-a-larger-problem-than-siri-gate-5e77ad62
Macrotrends. (2024). Apple number of employees 2010–2024. Macrotrends.net. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/number-of-employees
New York Times (2025, May 21) OpenAI Unites with Jony Ive in $6.5 Billion Deal to Create AI Devices. NYTimes.com. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/21/technology/openai-jony-ive-deal.html
Wikipedia contributors. (2024, May). Apple Industrial Design Group. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Industrial_Design_Group
You’re still here?! Well, let me reward your curiosity. You’ve heard the phrase “culture eats strategy for breakfast”? But what does mean. I began to break that down in the below post, where we look at how informal networks — the human connections we make outside the formal reporting relationships — spread information up to five-times faster than formal mandates. Check that out here.
