By 1996, most members of Apple's Board of Directors had been focused on how they could chop up Apple and sell it to the highest bidder. Upon his return, Jobs knew he needed a new board with a more positive attitude and a deeper loyalty to him as a leader. Within a few weeks, Jobs managed to force the resignation of most of Apple's board members, including former CEO --the man who provided critical seed money to get Apple off the ground in 1977.

In their place, Jobs installed close friends like Oracle CEO and former Apple VP of Marketing .

Jobs also restructured Apple as a company, clearing away the many product-centric departments that feuded and competed for company resources. In its place, Jobs installed company-wide departments for marketing, sales, manufacturing, and finance.

Prior to Jobs becoming iCEO, he had convinced Gil Amelio to place certain key NeXT employees in positions of influence at Apple. Most notable was , the mastermind behind OS X, who became Apple's Senior VP of Software Engineering in February 1997, and , who joined as Senior VP of Hardware Engineering the same month.