New Apple CEO John Ternus faces an old problem: the innovator’s dilemma

In today’s CEO Daily: Welcome to the John Ternus era at Apple .

The big leadership story: How long should a CEO get for a turnaround? The markets: Down globally at the start of September, a historically bad month for stocks.

Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune .

Good morning.

John Ternus steps up as CEO of Apple today in one of the most public and well-chronicled succession handoffs in recent memory.

My colleague Sebastian Herrera has written a great analysis of whether this low-key engineer can lead Apple to victory in the AI race.

That’s a key question to track for Apple and other companies at this pivotal moment.

And there are other questions to keep on the radar: Will Apple now have two centers of power? Tim Cook wrote an emotional memo to staff yesterday, in which he thanked colleagues for bringing out the best in him and praised the “brilliant and wonderful and capable” Ternus as the perfect person to lead Apple.

But Cook isn’t going away.

As executive chairman, he’ll not only continue to mentor his successor but also engage with policymakers and other external stakeholders on Apple’s behalf.

That’s not unusual—or even undesirable—in these tricky political times.

But it can add a layer of complication for the new guy, as Bob Chapek discovered when taking over from Bob Iger at Disney in 2020. (Iger remained as executive chairman and returned to the CEO role after Chapek was ousted in 2022.) Other CEOs have privately complained to me that leading a company can be awkward when their former boss sticks around.

The onus for getting that balance right will fall largely on Cook.

What problem does Apple have to fix? As Sebastian writes, “The job description for the chief executive at Apple—and the standards by which success is measured—have often been defined by the person in the role.” With the CEO title moving from a master operator (Cook’s background was in logistics and supply chain) to a master engineer with a quarter-century of experience working on Apple’s iconic devices, one might assume that Apple’s chief challenge is to reinvent its products for the AI era.