IW 50 Best: Apple's Road to the Top

Changing of the Guards

Driven by record performance in 2011, the company posted revenue of over $108 billion last year, which helped it secure its place at the top of the IW 50 list.

Dramatic growth isn't a new or unexpected phenomenon for Apple, however. Were it any other year for the company, these numbers might not be big news at all -- with its wild popularity both in the private and enterprise markets, at this point it's almost a given that Apple will break its own records year-after-year.

But 2011 was no ordinary year for Apple.

Last year, of course, Apple lost CEO Steve Jobs, the company's co-founder, savior and iconic leader. Without Jobs' tight grip on the vision and direction of the company, many thought Apple would flounder, drifting rudderless with the loss of such a charismatic chief.

However, Jobs' successor, Tim Cook, former COO and supply chain guru, has proven otherwise, as the performance numbers certainly reflect.

It might seem unlikely that Cook would help usher Apple to the top of a manufacturing list like the IW 50. It was Cook, after all, who pushed the company out of direct manufacturing in favor of contract manufacturers like Foxconn, where unsafe working conditions have put the company in a negative spotlight all year.

It has been Cook's direct handling of these situations, however, that is marking a new era for the company under his leadership.

"I admire Tim Cook because he's paying attention to something that Apple might not have paid attention to as quickly under Steve Jobs," says Apple analyst J. Gerry Purdy of MobileTrax, an IT market research firm. Under Jobs' reign, he says, issues like these were mostly pushed under the carpet.

"They weren't addressed then because they didn't need to be or nobody made an issue out of them," he says. "But Cook is looking at the entire ecosystem. He sees that they are too big, too important for those issues to exist. He wants to make sure all constituencies that touch Apple have a positive experience."

It is this attention to the whole manufacturing environment and issues arising across the supply chain that is already defining him as CEO, says Purdy.

"I think Cook may actually be a better CEO than Jobs from an overall standpoint because he has been able to take on and address these important issues instead of simply focusing on products," he says. "He is a magician on operational efficiency. I think that is what got him into this role and I think that is what will make him great."

"I still think they have a way to go," he added, "but these are some of the issues that have started to signal that Tim Cook is still focused on building insanely great products."