At a dinner during the Consumer Electronics Show in January, I asked Intel Corp. CEO Paul Otellini about Andy Grove, the icon who built Intel into a superpower and then deftly handed the top job to Craig Barrett in 1998.

Otellini, CEO since 2004, told me that he and Grove have dinner every six weeks, and Grove has been suggesting that he move Intel into making electric-car batteries. Otellini won’t do it. And Grove can get playfully grumpy about the fact that Intel is performing well enough to ignore him.

Not long after CES, Grove sarcastically asked about my conversation with Otellini: “Did he tell you how many pieces of advice of mine he has acted on?”

Compare that with Apple Inc. Ten years and a couple of CEOs after Steve Jobs, don’t expect to find that kind of banter and confidence at the company. Apple after Jobs will be lucky if it doesn’t become more dysfunctional than the Scranton branch of The Office’s Dunder Mifflin.

Jobs, dealing with vague but apparently serious health issues, in January took one of the most-discussed leaves of absence in the annals of business. Whether or not Jobs returns to work at the end of June as planned, Apple isn’t likely to see an effective transfer of power or a separation of the builder from the company he created.

A classic business book helps explain why. In 1994’s Built to Last, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras tease out the common traits of companies that remained successful across generations, comparing them with others that burned brightly and then fizzled. The enduring companies were shaped by leaders the authors call “clock builders.” The others were led by charismatic “time tellers.”

Clock builders devote themselves to creating a system that can keep going no matter who is in charge. Sam Walton of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. was like that. So was Charles Coffin, the first president of General Electric Co. And Intel’s Grove. The founders of the United States were clock builders.

Time tellers tend to be CEOs whom everyone in the company looks to for answers; they can tell the time, but no one else can. And since the CEO is so good at this, no one below him or her bothers to learn how. So once the time teller leaves, the company is left ill-equipped and can descend into mediocrity or even chaos.

I’d put some of the most brilliant and important business leaders into that camp. Juan Trippe created Pan American World Airways and dominated commercial air travel for four decades. Walt Disney constructed a family-entertainment empire. Trippe retired in 1968, and by the late ’80s Pan Am had been sold off in pieces. Walt died in 1966. For 15 years, his company made increasingly disastrous movies. (Remember Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo? Didn’t think so.) The company would’ve been toast if not for the fact that Walt put in enough built-to-last mechanisms that ­Michael Eisner was able to reenergize the company more than 20 years after Walt died—mostly by trying to do the things Walt would’ve done.

Jobs has proved his business brilliance, and Apple could coast nicely for a number of years just on Jobs-fueled momentum. But by most accounts, he has not groomed a successor or codified the secrets of his magic. Apple has no real research lab, no apparatus for channeling Steve’s brain. If Apple wants to be around for generations, it has to start building its clock now.