Shortly after
Tim Cook
succeeded
Steve Jobs
as CEO of
Apple
AAPL -0.27%
in August 2011, he told a confidant that he got up every morning
reminding himself just to do the right thing—and not to think about what
Steve would have done.
But Jobs's ghost
loomed everywhere after he died from pancreatic cancer two months
later. Obituaries of Apple's visionary founder blanketed the front pages
of newspapers and websites. TV stations ran lengthy segments glorifying
the changes he brought to the world.
In
New York, publisher Simon & Schuster rushed out
Walter Isaacson's
biography of Jobs a month early—with a sleek, Apple-esque cover
featuring a photo blessed by the late CEO. Apple chose the same image as
the tribute photo on its home page. The photo was so quintessentially
Jobsian that his friends and colleagues marveled at how he still seemed
to be orchestrating the narrative from beyond the grave.
Even
the ritual remembrances unfolded as though Jobs had staged them
himself. A memorial service on a Sunday evening at Stanford University
was organized by his longtime event planner, and the guest list read
like a Who's Who of notables in Jobs's life:
Bill Gates,
Larry Page,
Rupert Murdoch
and the Clinton family, among others.
Joan Baez,
Jobs's onetime girlfriend, sang "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot." Bono
performed
Bob Dylan's
"Every Grain of Sand." Yo-Yo Ma brought his cello and played
Bach—a personal request from Jobs before his death. Jobs was gone but
not gone. Somehow he had transcended death to obsess over the launch of
one last product: his own legacy.
Tim
Cook, whom Jobs had personally picked as Apple's new CEO, was at the
service, but attendees gave the former chief operating officer little
thought. Even as he took control of Apple's empire, Cook couldn't escape
his boss's shadow. How could anyone compete with a visionary so
brilliant that not even death could make him go away?
The
genius trap had long been set for Jobs's successor. Apple had been
defined by him for more than a decade. Design, product development,
marketing strategies and executive appointments—all hinged on his
tastes. Apple's accomplishments weren't Jobs's alone, but he had taken
credit for most of them, which further fed his legend. One employee even
owned a car with the vanity plate "WWSJD": What Would Steve Jobs Do?
The
next CEO didn't have the quasi-religious authority that Jobs had
radiated. Cook's every decision would be examined by current and former
employees and executives, investors, the media and Apple's consumers. He
would also have to contend with the sky-high expectations that Jobs had
conditioned the public to have for Apple.
Cook
was a seasoned businessman and arguably a better manager than Jobs. He
was organized, prepared and more realistic about the burdens of running a
company of Apple's size. But no one could beat Jobs at being
Jobs—especially Cook, his polar opposite.
Tim Cook and Steve Jobs at an Apple news conference in 2007
Corbis
If Jobs was the star, Cook was the
stage manager. If Jobs was idealistic, Cook was practical. But without
Jobs, Cook had no counterweight to his dogged pragmatism. Who would
provide the creative sparks?
The
succession was complicated by the fact that no one knew who Cook really
was. The new CEO was a mystery. Some colleagues called him a blank
slate. As far as anyone could tell, Cook had no close friends, never
socialized and rarely talked about his personal life.
The
quiet, self-contained Cook grew up as the second of three brothers. In
his early years, the family lived in Pensacola, Fla.; his father worked
as a shipyard foreman, and his mother was a homemaker. They later moved
to Robertsdale, Ala., a small, predominantly white town near the Gulf of
Mexico that was quiet, stable and safe. In high school, he was voted
"most studious." He represented his town at Boys State, an American
Legion mock legislature program, and won an essay contest organized by
the Alabama Rural Electric Association on the topic of "Rural Electric
Cooperatives—Challengers of Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow." Outside of
class, Cook was appointed the business manager of the yearbook because
he was meticulous and good with numbers.
Cook began his career at
IBM
IBM -0.05%
after graduating from Auburn University with a degree in
industrial engineering. Later he added an M.B.A. from Duke. After 12
years, he moved to a small Colorado computer reseller called Intelligent
Electronics Inc., where he nearly doubled the firm's revenues. He was
plucked by Compaq and moved to Houston. One day a headhunter called:
Apple was looking for a senior vice president of world-wide operations.
"Why don't you come and meet Steve Jobs?" the recruiter asked.
Cook
joined Apple's executive team in the spring of 1998, while the company
was in the throes of restructuring and desperate for a capable executive
who could make Apple's manufacturing process more efficient. Unlike his
predecessors, who sat with the operations team, Cook asked for a small
office cater-cornered to Jobs's on the executive floor. It was a shrewd
strategy—staying close to the boss to be attuned to his thinking.
From
the start of his Apple tenure, Cook set colossally high expectations.
He wanted the best price, the best delivery, the best yield, the best
everything. "I want you to act like we are a $20 billion company," he
told the procurement team—even though Apple then had only about $6
billion in annual revenues and was barely eking out a profit. They were
playing in a new league now.
To some,
Cook was a machine; to others, he was riveting. He could strike terror
in the hearts of his subordinates, but he could also motivate them to
toil from dawn to midnight for just a word of praise.
Those
who interacted only passingly with Cook saw him as a gentle Southerner
with an aura reminiscent of Mister Rogers. But he wasn't approachable.
Over the years, colleagues had tried to engage him in personal
conversations, with little success. He worked out at a different gym
than the one on Apple's campus and didn't fraternize outside of work.
Years earlier, when Apple was about
to ship its movie-editing software, iMovie, Jobs wanted his executives
to test it out by making home movies. Cook made his about house hunting
and how little one got for one's money in the late 1990s in Palo Alto
real estate. While amusing, the movie revealed nothing about him.
Apple
under Jobs was a roller coaster, but Cook's operations fief was orderly
and disciplined. Cook knew every detail in every step of the operations
processes. Weekly operations meetings could last five to six hours as
he ground through every single item. His subordinates soon learned to
plan for meetings with him as if they were cramming for an exam. Even a
small miss of a couple of hundred units was examined closely. "Your
numbers," one planner recalled him saying flatly, "make me want to jump
out that window over there."
Cook had
made a particular point of tackling Apple's monstrous inventory, which
he considered fundamentally evil. He called himself the "Attila the Hun
of inventory."
Meetings with Cook could
be terrifying. He exuded a Zenlike calm and didn't waste words. "Talk
about your numbers. Put your spreadsheet up," he'd say as he nursed a
Mountain Dew. (Some staffers wondered why he wasn't bouncing off the
walls from the caffeine.) When Cook turned the spotlight on someone, he
hammered them with questions until he was satisfied. "Why is that?"
"What do you mean?" "I don't understand. Why are you not making it
clear?" He was known to ask the same exact question 10 times in a row.
Cook also knew the power of silence.
He could do more with a pause than Jobs ever could with an epithet. When
someone was unable to answer a question, Cook would sit without a word
while people stared at the table and shifted in their seats. The silence
would be so intense and uncomfortable that everyone in the room wanted
to back away. Unperturbed, Cook didn't move a finger as he focused his
eyes on his squirming target. Sometimes he would take an energy bar from
his pocket while he waited for an answer, and the hush would be broken
only by the crackling of the wrapper.
Even
in Apple's unrelenting culture, Cook's meetings stood out as harsh. On
one occasion, a manager from another group who was sitting in was
shocked to hear Cook tell an underling, "That number is wrong. Get out
of here."
Cook's quarterly reviews were
especially torturous because Cook would grind through the minutiae as he
categorized what worked and what didn't, using yellow Post-its. His
managers crossed their fingers in the hopes of emerging unscathed.
"We're safe as long as we're not at the back of the pack," they would
say to each other.
Cook demonstrated the
same level of austerity and discipline in his life as he did in his
work. He woke up at 4:30 or 5 a.m. and hit the gym several times a week.
He ate protein bars throughout the day and had simple meals like
chicken and rice for lunch.
His stamina
was inhuman. He could fly to Asia, spend three days there, fly back,
land at 7 a.m. at the airport and be in the office by 8:30,
interrogating someone about some numbers.
Cook
was also relentlessly frugal. For many years, he lived in a rental unit
in a dingy ranch-style building with no air conditioning. He said it
reminded him of his humble roots. When he finally purchased a house, it
was a modest 2,400-square-foot home, built on a half-lot with a single
parking spot. His first sports car was a used Porsche Boxster, an
entry-level sports car that enthusiasts called the "poor man's Porsche."
Even
his hobbies were hard-core: cycling and rock climbing. During
vacations, he never ventured far. Among his favorite spots were Yosemite
and Utah's Zion National Park.
Cook
placed
Robert F. Kennedy
and the Rev.
Martin Luther King Jr.
among his heroes, and photos of both men hung in his office. In a
statement that hinted at how Cook viewed his relationship with Jobs, he
said that he admired the way RFK had been comfortable standing in his
brother's shadow. The martyred senator embodied everything that Cook
strove to be—hardworking, principled and charitable.
As
tough as Cook was reputed to be, he was also generous. He gave away the
frequent-flier miles that he racked up as Christmas gifts, and he
volunteered at a soup kitchen during the Thanksgiving holidays. He had
also participated in an annual two-day cycling event across Georgia to
raise money for multiple sclerosis; Cook had been a supporter since
being misdiagnosed with the disease years before. "The doctor said, 'Mr.
Cook, you've either had a stroke, or you have MS,' " Cook told the
Auburn alumni magazine. He didn't have either. His symptoms had been
produced from "lugging a lot of incredibly heavy luggage around."
In
August 2011, a few months before Jobs died, Cook sent his first email
as CEO to employees. "I want you to be confident that Apple is not going
to change," he wrote. "Steve built a company and culture that is unlike
any other in the world and we are going to stay true to that—it is in
our DNA." He added, "I am confident our best years lie ahead of us and
that together we will continue to make Apple the magical place that it
is." He signed the memo simply, "Tim."
After
Jobs's death, Apple's employees rallied around Cook. But privately,
many were anxious. Employees in departments that had heretofore had
little to do with Cook worried about how their jobs might change. The
operations team, familiar with his tough management style, worried about
life becoming even more intense.
In his
first days as CEO, Cook made two key moves. First, he promoted Eddy
Cue, Apple's enormously popular vice president for Internet services.
Cue had been Jobs's guy, managing the iTunes group and eventually all of
Apple's Internet services. He was Jobs's deal maker as well,
negotiating with music labels, movie studios, book publishers and media
companies. When Cook finally made him senior vice president, it
generated goodwill inside and outside the company—and turned an
important Jobs loyalist into a key Cook ally.
Cook's
second decision was to start a charity program, matching donations of
up to $10,000, dollar for dollar annually. This too was widely embraced:
The lack of an Apple corporate-matching program had long been a sore
point for many employees. Jobs had considered matching programs
particularly ineffective because the contributions would never amount to
enough to make a difference. Some of his friends believed that Jobs
would have taken up some causes once he had more time, but Jobs used to
say that he was contributing to society more meaningfully by building a
good company and creating jobs. Cook believed firmly in charity. "My
objective—one day—is to totally help others," he said. "To me, that's
real success, when you can say, 'I don't need it anymore. I'm going to
do something else.' "
The moves signaled
a shift to a more benevolent regime. Though still shuttered to the
outside eye, Apple felt more open internally. The new CEO communicated
with employees more frequently via emails and town-hall meetings. Unlike
Jobs, who always ate lunch with the design guru
Jonathan Ive,
Cook went to the cafeteria and introduced himself to employees he
didn't know, asking if he could join them. Without Jobs breathing down
their necks, the atmosphere was more relaxed. Cook was a more
traditional CEO who infused Apple with a healthier work environment.
Cook
proved a methodical and efficient CEO. Unlike Jobs, who seemed to
operate on gut, Cook demanded hard numbers on projected cost and
profits. Whereas Jobs had reveled in divisiveness, Cook valued
collegiality and teamwork. Cook was also more visible and transparent
with investors.
Not everyone was so
enamored. The changes Cook made were perceived as signs of increasing
stodginess. The yearning for more subversive days was also palpable.
Skeptics soon began expressing doubts about Apple's future, especially
after the rocky launch of Siri, its virtual personal-assistant feature.
"Without the arrival of a new charismatic leader, it will move from being a great company to being a good company,"
George Colony,
the CEO of technology research firm
Forrester Research,
FORR -0.08%
wrote in a blog. "Like
Sony,
6758.TO -2.08%
Polaroid, Apple circa 1985, and
Disney,
DIS +0.41%
Apple will coast and then decelerate."
Above
it all, the specter of Steve Jobs still hovered—somewhere beyond
reproach and accountability, beyond the tangle of human fallibility. His
successors remained stuck here on Earth.
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