Why does Apple leadership stop at Senior Vice President?
I don't know a great deal about business structure or hierarchy so I am a little curious. Upon looking through Apple's Leadership line up, I noticed aside from the CEO position, all of the other leadership members have the title "Senior Vice President". Every executive listed from their hardware engineering to their marketing are SVPs. Why is that? There isn't a president dedicated overseeing each department?
Comments
Tim Cook; CEO. "The President"
Senior Vice Presidents (head the departments: iOS, Hardware, Industrial Design, Online S&S, Finance, Law, Operations, Marketing and Retail)
Vice Presidents (OS X Software, Product marketing, everything else)
Engineers/Other staff
This is a fairly old image, but this is effectively what it is like:
... Why is that? ...
It is was that way because it worked. There have been some changes since the unfortunate passing of Steve Jobs. It is my understanding that now Jonathan Ive answers to no one.
I gather from your question that you feel that Apple's corporate structure is unconventional. To put this into perspective, I will paraphrase a statement originated by someone wiser than I: "If you do what everyone else does, then you will get what everyone else gets."
I think you get two corporate structures, those like IBM/HP where there is no owner/founder driving so the CEO is top dog but wouldn't dictate how things need to be to his top tech people as his decisions are based on their advise.
With Oracle, Apple, Google, Facebook etc whose owner/founder/creator is still at the helm, they have the technical know how to dictate what they want. They will listen to their underlings but at the end of the day they will make a change to how their vision of the company should go, this doesn't happen the same way for non-owner operators.
Google's Sergey and Larry have a very tight reign on how the company moves.