Apple’s HR / DEI executive exits after less than two years

Carol Surface, Apple’s Senior Vice President of People (photo: May Tse/South China Morning Post/Getty Images)
Apple’s chief people officer, Carol Surface, is exiting after a brief tenure of less than two years, Bloomberg News’ Mark Gurman reports ciing “sources familiar with the matter.” This departure is unusual for a high-ranking executive at the company.
Mark Gurman for Bloomberg News:
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When Surface joined Apple, she took over the people role from Deirdre O’Brien, who had been managing that team in addition to the company’s retail stores. With Surface’s departure, O’Brien will return to her prior role of running both groups.
Though Surface remains listed on Apple’s executive biographies website as of Wednesday afternoon, a spokesperson for Apple confirmed the moves.
The chief people officer title was created for Surface, who was tasked with overseeing human resources, inclusion, diversity, and recruiting for Apple’s roughly 160,000 employees.
The company’s HR organization has seen other changes recently, with its prior head of diversity and inclusion leaving earlier this year. She was replaced by Cynthia Bowman, who joined from Bank of America Corp.
Surface’s quick departure is rare for executives at her level of seniority.

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MacDailyNews Take: Back to double duty, Deirdre!
Apple should take this opportunity to concentrate on the Human Resources and junk the DEI crap:
Making hiring decisions based on skin color is, by definition, racist. – MacDailyNews, July 14, 2023
Getting the absolute best people should remain Apple’s ultimate goal. Forced diversity carries its own set of problems. Would the group be comprised of the best-qualifed people possible or would it be designed to hit pre-defined quotas? Would some employees, consciously or unconsciously, consider certain employees, or even themselves, to be tokens meant to fill a quota? That would be a suboptimal result for Apple and everyone involved.
The best and desired outcome is for the quest for diversity to work in Apple’s favor. Truly looking at qualified people from a larger pool would likely result in delivering different viewpoints and new ways of looking at things and tackling problems than a more homogenized workforce would likely be capable of delivering.
Regardless and of course, someday it sure would be nice for everyone to just be able to evaluate a person’s potential, not measuring and tabulating superficial, meaningless things like skin color and gender.
How do we ever get to the point where people “will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” when we insist on judging people by the color of their skin? — MacDailyNews, December 31, 2015
See also:
• Apple on the losing side as Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions – June 29, 2023
• Several U.S. state attorneys general threaten legal action over Apple, others’ ‘diversity’ policies – July 14, 2023

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