Randomly Noted

Apple Inc. shareholders deserved to know about Steve Jobs’ liver transplant – from Apple’s board of directors, not from The Wall Street Journal. Kudos to the WSJ’s Yukari Iwatani Kane and Joann S. Lublin for digging up the news, which will be closely watched by Apple shareholders (and competitors) today. (Here’s the WSJ story: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124546193182433491.html) Given Jobs’s absolute centrality to Apple – in many investors’ minds, Jobs IS Apple – the board should have seen to it that the information was disseminated widely after the transplant if not before, when he took the decision to undergo the surgery. This is the type of relevant information investors need to have when evaluating whether to put their money into a company – or keep it there. The secrecy Apple has maintained over Jobs’ health issues in recent years is understandable, given their natural desire to protect the boss’s privacy. But it’s wrong-headed from a governance standpoint. The fig leaf that Jobs was already on medical leave, and so Apple didn’t have to disclose the liver transplant violates the spirit of corporate transparency. It’s simply not in the interest of the company’s stakeholders. The WSJ quotes John Olson of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher as saying, “You can’t expect the company to give a blow-by-blow account of Steve Jobs’s health.” Indeed, we don’t need to know about the small medical hiccups. But an organ transplant ranks as a major health event, in anyone’s life much less the innovator-in-chief of Apple Inc.