Steve Jobs takes a leave of absence, Apple stock down after hours

Over the last several months as prospects for Michigan’s auto industry looked grim and grimmer, a number of people suggested to me that the problem was a lack of “cool.” All the auto industry needed was a visionary like Apple Inc.’s Steve Jobs to turn things around, to make the kinds of American cars that consumers would snap up like iPods and iPhones.

iCars? I think not.

The problem with the concept of a single charismatic and visionary leader is that the entire company or industry would flounder if the key person was suddenly out of the picture. Witness the situation unfolding at Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) now that Steve Jobs has announced that he is taking a leave of absence from the company for health reasons. The media is frenetic and all over the map, some journalists writing what are little more than eulogies, and at the other extreme some journalists are dismissing this changing of the guard as merely temporary, without impact on the business or the products or the customers.

And the market is holding its breath; Apple’s shares were down more than six percent in after hours trading.

This is not the first time that Jobs has stepped down; he left in 2004 for surgical removal of a form of pancreatic cancer, leaving Tim Cook at the helm. The firm’s performance did not appear to suffer in 2004 under Cook’s short-term leadership. Jobs eventually returned to the helm after recovery — and now Tim Cook is once again in the top slot as Jobs steps aside to deal with his health.

Were this Bob Nardelli, Rick Wagoner or Bob Lutz stepping aside abruptly from Chrysler or General Motors, stock value and overall market might dip briefly. But the auto business would continue to do what it’s done, and the media would have a leader not unlike Nardelli/Wagoner/Lutz in short order to dog about the state of the industry, and the stock wouldn’t register much change. (Of course, at GM’s current valuation, a six percent shift in stock value would be mere cents.)

Apple, however, could swing wildly in both corporate performance and stock value, based on the early reaction in financial media. Breathtaking, but entirely too much volatility for automakers if not inappropriate to technology firms. Apple can keep their visionary key man business model, assuming that Jobs can wrestle his health problem into submission the way he has the MP3 player and until now touch-screen smart phone market.

(Disclosure: I hold a small amount of Apple stock in an investment account.)