Different runners, one baton

Across six Olympic Games from Los Angeles 1984 to Athens 2004, the United States of America’s record in the men’s 4x100m relay stood at three gold medals, two silver medals and one disqualification. At Beijing 2008, the US relay team, made up of Rodney Martin, Travis Padgett, Darvis Patton and Tyson Gay, were all sub-10 sprinters.

With four sub-10 runners on the team, expectations were high. Any rational punter could bank on such a talented team making the final and probably the podium for a medal.

“On your marks; set.” The gun boomed, and the runners began to burn the track. For the first, second and third legs, the USA team had a seamless exchange. But between the third and fourth legs, run by Darvis Patton and Tyson Gay, the baton dropped unexpectedly. Gay reached back for the baton; there was slight contact. Unfortunately, Patton let go before Gay could hold the baton firmly; the baton dropped. The team with four sub-10 runners was out. “Then I went to grab it, and there was nothing,” Gay stated after the heartbreak of the baton exchange.

To an outsider, the baton exchange looks simple and mundane. However, for athletes, it takes lots of training and practice to perfect the act. No matter how talented and skillful a relay quartet is, the baton determines their success or failure in a relay race.

Many athletics watchers saw the USA relay quartet’s individual sprinting ability in Beijing as an edge. However, a study led by Takeo Matsubayashi, a research scientist at the Japan Institute of Sports Sciences, and conducted at the World Athletics Championships Tokyo 2025, has introduced new insights into what determines the winner in a relay race. Their research concluded that success in a relay race does not hinge on individual sprint ability; the amount lost during baton exchange varies and thus influences race outcomes. The study also found that the most effective exchange maintains the baton’s velocity. This, the study stated, is achieved by minimising the incoming runner’s loss of speed, while giving the outgoing runner ample time to accelerate before receiving the baton. It also established baton exchange as a critical factor in winning a relay race.

From Matsubayashi’s study, one can infer what might have happened to the USA team in Beijing: individual speed means little without proper baton exchange, which the study identified as germane to maintaining baton velocity. The tracks and corporate setting, though divergent, have a point of intersection. They have a goal to meet; to achieve those goals, they have to be competitive. And to be competitive, they have to pick the one person in their talent pool best equipped to receive the baton from the incoming person without glitches.

The baton exchange also mirrors what happens in the corporate world in the form of succession, particularly among the C-suite. Over time, Apple has shifted its focus from the speed of athletes to the baton exchange. Before Steve Jobs, Apple had four succession handoffs with five CEOs.

Mike Scott brought corporate identity. Mike Markkula followed, steadying Apple’s ship before it sank. Despite this achievement, Apple still needed a perfect steersman to keep it on course. Next came Sculley, who raised Apple’s revenues before sales declined in 1993. For Michael Spindler and Gil Amelio, their tenure was characterised by staff layoffs, frozen salaries, streamlined operations, and the biggest loss during Amelio’s era.

Looking closely at Apple, it is clear that not all CEOs handled the baton the same way; even their gait and speed differ. What about the baton exchange? Some outgoing CEOs were clumsy with their exchange, while some incoming CEOs didn’t grip the baton firmly. Despite this, the baton never dropped.

This is a four-time baton exchange between five runners with different capabilities, and the differences in the baton’s velocity between the incoming and outgoing CEO reflect Apple’s fortunes, as it has had a halcyon period and a downturn at different times.

The story of the USA 4×100 m is not straightforward. It rises and falls; the same goes for Apple. Although all eight came from different backgrounds, only five of the eight Apple CEOs were promoted from within. The remaining three—Michael Scott, John Sculley, and Gil Amelio—were recruited from the carbonated soft drinks industry and the analog/mixed-signal chips industry. This implies that when the capabilities needed to move the company ahead are not available internally, they look outward.

With Apple gasping for breath, Jobs was charged with changing its fortune as CEO. Just as his black turtleneck set him apart visually, his obsession with new product inventions, perfection, and a glowing customer experience; his drive to seek new tasks after completing one; and a hunter’s mentality in recruitment brought out capabilities unlike those of past Apple CEOs.

Writing on Jobs’ inherent talent in spotting capabilities and making compelling pitches to convince prospects, William Gallagher, in his October 15, 2025 piece in AppleInsider, wrote that IBM’s Don Estridge was his choice to be the CEO after Markkula; but Estridge never wanted Apple. Despite the rejection, Jobs offered a masterclass in recruitment with his pitch: “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?” he said to John Sculley.

The question is: why did Jobs look away from Apple to headhunt the next CEO? Another person may have gone for a look-alike. Not Jobs! Jobs knew the business world could be brutal. He went for somebody with the capability the company needed at that point in time.

If we marvelled at Jobs’ “Do you want to sell sugar water…” storyteller’s pitch to Sculley, his marketer’s viewpoint of not taking “no” for an answer from Tim Cook showed he sees potential where many see nothing. Quoting Cook: “I had gotten a call several times from the search people that [Jobs] had employed, and I kept saying no.”

Jobs, like a skilful marksman who rarely misses his target, in a meeting with Cook, tabled his vision: a strategy that swept Tim Cook off his feet, and he left Compaq for Apple in 1998 as Senior Vice President of Worldwide Operations.

Though cut from a different cloth from Jobs, Cook is also on the lookout for capabilities. According to him: “If you’re a CEO, the most important thing — to me — is to pick people around you that aren’t like you, that complement you.”

Notwithstanding his impressive tenure as CEO, Cook’s tenure has not been without blemish. Mark Ritson, in his 21 April 2026 piece, “Tim Cook Grew Apple by Reducing Its Ambition” for Adweek, said: “Cook’s Apple did not launch a single genuinely new product category that has actually mattered.” And where Cook’s Apple did, Ritson wrote, “it didn’t redefine a category the way the iPhone redefined everything.”

On September 1, 2026, Tim Cook said, “My title changes tomorrow,” as he exchanged the Apple baton to John Ternus, Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering, to continue with the race.

With eight CEOs, the baton exchanges have shown that the eight are from different areas of endeavour, with different skill sets that the organisation needed at that point in the company’s cycle. So, why a hardware engineer at this particular point in time? Mark Ritson, in the piece, regarded AI as the future; arguably, the capabilities of the seven CEOs may not make Apple competitive in its industry if they were made CEO in 2026. Mark Ritson wrote, “And then there is the future and the biggest miss of the Cook era: AI.”

No single individual can tick all the boxes; capabilities are infinite, and not all can be housed in one man. The real task is spotting that one man who possesses the capabilities required for the next phase of growth and innovation.

For this cycle, the baton exchange has been made, with the capability found in John Ternus from the pool of talent within. As a hardware engineer, he is likely to connect the dots differently from Cook, a core operations guy.

His first word on X was “Hello”. The world has replied with “Hi”. The world awaits him to show his capability in a fast-paced industry; Apple is a player. Ko si ere ni Moscow, as they say in Naija local parlance. There is no time for play in Moscow.

Shodunke, a media practitioner, writes via [email protected] runners, one baton

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Across six Olympic Games from Los Angeles 1984 to Athens 2004, the United States of America’s record in the men’s 4x100m relay stood at three gold medals, two silver medals and one disqualification. At Beijing 2008, the US relay team, made up of Rodney Martin, Travis Padgett, Darvis Patton and Tyson Gay, were all sub-10 sprinters.

With four sub-10 runners on the team, expectations were high. Any rational punter could bank on such a talented team making the final and probably the podium for a medal.

“On your marks; set.” The gun boomed, and the runners began to burn the track. For the first, second and third legs, the USA team had a seamless exchange. But between the third and fourth legs, run by Darvis Patton and Tyson Gay, the baton dropped unexpectedly. Gay reached back for the baton; there was slight contact. Unfortunately, Patton let go before Gay could hold the baton firmly; the baton dropped. The team with four sub-10 runners was out. “Then I went to grab it, and there was nothing,” Gay stated after the heartbreak of the baton exchange.

To an outsider, the baton exchange looks simple and mundane. However, for athletes, it takes lots of training and practice to perfect the act. No matter how talented and skillful a relay quartet is, the baton determines their success or failure in a relay race.

Many athletics watchers saw the USA relay quartet’s individual sprinting ability in Beijing as an edge. However, a study led by Takeo Matsubayashi, a research scientist at the Japan Institute of Sports Sciences, and conducted at the World Athletics Championships Tokyo 2025, has introduced new insights into what determines the winner in a relay race. Their research concluded that success in a relay race does not hinge on individual sprint ability; the amount lost during baton exchange varies and thus influences race outcomes. The study also found that the most effective exchange maintains the baton’s velocity. This, the study stated, is achieved by minimising the incoming runner’s loss of speed, while giving the outgoing runner ample time to accelerate before receiving the baton. It also established baton exchange as a critical factor in winning a relay race.

From Matsubayashi’s study, one can infer what might have happened to the USA team in Beijing: individual speed means little without proper baton exchange, which the study identified as germane to maintaining baton velocity. The tracks and corporate setting, though divergent, have a point of intersection. They have a goal to meet; to achieve those goals, they have to be competitive. And to be competitive, they have to pick the one person in their talent pool best equipped to receive the baton from the incoming person without glitches.

The baton exchange also mirrors what happens in the corporate world in the form of succession, particularly among the C-suite. Over time, Apple has shifted its focus from the speed of athletes to the baton exchange. Before Steve Jobs, Apple had four succession handoffs with five CEOs.

Mike Scott brought corporate identity. Mike Markkula followed, steadying Apple’s ship before it sank. Despite this achievement, Apple still needed a perfect steersman to keep it on course. Next came Sculley, who raised Apple’s revenues before sales declined in 1993. For Michael Spindler and Gil Amelio, their tenure was characterised by staff layoffs, frozen salaries, streamlined operations, and the biggest loss during Amelio’s era.

Looking closely at Apple, it is clear that not all CEOs handled the baton the same way; even their gait and speed differ. What about the baton exchange? Some outgoing CEOs were clumsy with their exchange, while some incoming CEOs didn’t grip the baton firmly. Despite this, the baton never dropped.

This is a four-time baton exchange between five runners with different capabilities, and the differences in the baton’s velocity between the incoming and outgoing CEO reflect Apple’s fortunes, as it has had a halcyon period and a downturn at different times.

The story of the USA 4×100 m is not straightforward. It rises and falls; the same goes for Apple. Although all eight came from different backgrounds, only five of the eight Apple CEOs were promoted from within. The remaining three—Michael Scott, John Sculley, and Gil Amelio—were recruited from the carbonated soft drinks industry and the analog/mixed-signal chips industry. This implies that when the capabilities needed to move the company ahead are not available internally, they look outward.

With Apple gasping for breath, Jobs was charged with changing its fortune as CEO. Just as his black turtleneck set him apart visually, his obsession with new product inventions, perfection, and a glowing customer experience; his drive to seek new tasks after completing one; and a hunter’s mentality in recruitment brought out capabilities unlike those of past Apple CEOs.

Writing on Jobs’ inherent talent in spotting capabilities and making compelling pitches to convince prospects, William Gallagher, in his October 15, 2025 piece in AppleInsider, wrote that IBM’s Don Estridge was his choice to be the CEO after Markkula; but Estridge never wanted Apple. Despite the rejection, Jobs offered a masterclass in recruitment with his pitch: “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?” he said to John Sculley.

The question is: why did Jobs look away from Apple to headhunt the next CEO? Another person may have gone for a look-alike. Not Jobs! Jobs knew the business world could be brutal. He went for somebody with the capability the company needed at that point in time.

If we marvelled at Jobs’ “Do you want to sell sugar water…” storyteller’s pitch to Sculley, his marketer’s viewpoint of not taking “no” for an answer from Tim Cook showed he sees potential where many see nothing. Quoting Cook: “I had gotten a call several times from the search people that [Jobs] had employed, and I kept saying no.”

Jobs, like a skilful marksman who rarely misses his target, in a meeting with Cook, tabled his vision: a strategy that swept Tim Cook off his feet, and he left Compaq for Apple in 1998 as Senior Vice President of Worldwide Operations.

Though cut from a different cloth from Jobs, Cook is also on the lookout for capabilities. According to him: “If you’re a CEO, the most important thing — to me — is to pick people around you that aren’t like you, that complement you.”

Notwithstanding his impressive tenure as CEO, Cook’s tenure has not been without blemish. Mark Ritson, in his 21 April 2026 piece, “Tim Cook Grew Apple by Reducing Its Ambition” for Adweek, said: “Cook’s Apple did not launch a single genuinely new product category that has actually mattered.” And where Cook’s Apple did, Ritson wrote, “it didn’t redefine a category the way the iPhone redefined everything.”

On September 1, 2026, Tim Cook said, “My title changes tomorrow,” as he exchanged the Apple baton to John Ternus, Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering, to continue with the race.

With eight CEOs, the baton exchanges have shown that the eight are from different areas of endeavour, with different skill sets that the organisation needed at that point in the company’s cycle. So, why a hardware engineer at this particular point in time? Mark Ritson, in the piece, regarded AI as the future; arguably, the capabilities of the seven CEOs may not make Apple competitive in its industry if they were made CEO in 2026. Mark Ritson wrote, “And then there is the future and the biggest miss of the Cook era: AI.”

No single individual can tick all the boxes; capabilities are infinite, and not all can be housed in one man. The real task is spotting that one man who possesses the capabilities required for the next phase of growth and innovation.

For this cycle, the baton exchange has been made, with the capability found in John Ternus from the pool of talent within. As a hardware engineer, he is likely to connect the dots differently from Cook, a core operations guy.

His first word on X was “Hello”. The world has replied with “Hi”. The world awaits him to show his capability in a fast-paced industry; Apple is a player. Ko si ere ni Moscow, as they say in Naija local parlance. There is no time for play in Moscow.

Shodunke, a media practitioner, writes via [email protected]