Apple's head of worldwide HR, Denise Young Smith, to become VP for Inclusion and Diversity, reporting to Tim Cook; CFO Luca Maestri to temporarily fill HR role
Jordan Kahn / 9to5Mac :
Context & Ripple Effects
In May 2017, Apple split its people leadership in two: Denise Young Smith moved from running worldwide HR into a newly created VP of Inclusion and Diversity role with a direct line to Tim Cook, while CFO Luca Maestri covered HR in the interim. Reporting to the CEO rather than through an operations chain was the clearest signal yet that Apple wanted diversity treated as an executive-level mandate rather than an HR program.
The related coverage shows how short-lived that structure proved. Within months, Smith's remarks about diversity being "tagged to" minority groups forced a staff-wide apology email, and by November she had exited entirely, replaced by Deloitte veteran Christie Smith — the first turn in a rotation that would see the role change hands again in 2020 before Apple later tried a different structure altogether with a dedicated chief people officer.
First-order effects
- Luca Maestri now carries worldwide HR duties on top of the CFO role, an interim arrangement that leaves Apple's largest corporate function without a permanent owner.
- Denise Young Smith gains a direct reporting line to Tim Cook, elevating inclusion and diversity above the level where it previously sat inside the worldwide HR organization.
Second-order effects
- Putting the role in the CEO's reporting line raised its visibility enough that Smith's October comments triggered a company-wide apology and, weeks later, her departure — Apple then went outside for a replacement, hiring Christie Smith from Deloitte.
- Each vacancy in the post forced another temporary patchwork: when Christie Smith left in 2020, Apple again ran the function without a long-term successor, foreshadowing the later shift of HR responsibilities onto retail chief Deirdre O'Brien.
Third-order effects
- The pattern across the corpus — Smith out in 2017, Christie Smith out in 2020, Carol Surface hired as Apple's first chief people officer in 2023 and gone by late 2024 with O'Brien reassuming HR — suggests Apple has never found a durable home for standalone people and diversity leadership, cycling instead between dedicated roles and folding the work back into line executives.
- If that cycle holds, high-profile D&I titles at large tech firms function less as stable institutions than as executive appointments tied to individual incumbents, with structure reset every few years.
The trend: Corporate diversity-and-inclusion leadership at major tech companies is proving structurally unstable, with Apple repeatedly creating, refilling, and dissolving dedicated people-operations roles over seven years.