Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [98]
Under Cook, Apple has become a master of execution. The company rarely introduces new products without first selling out its current inventory—a feat it routinely pulls off with new Macs, iPods, and iPhones. Invariably, new products are already stocked in Apple’s retail stores worldwide by the time Jobs is ready to announce them. One of the most remarkable transitions orchestrated under Cook’s watch is the switch to Intel processors in 2006. Apple managed to convert its entire line of computers from models running older PowerPC chips to newer models with Intel chips without a hitch or even a dip in sales. Even though customers knew newer computers with Intel chips were coming, they didn’t stop buying the older models.
Thanks to his obvious competence, Cook has enjoyed a rapid rise through the ranks of Apple’s upper management. In 2000, Jobs put him in charge of Apple’s sales force and its customer support operation. In 2002, Jobs appointed him as head of worldwide sales. In 2004, the year Cook stood in for Jobs, he was chosen to lead the company’s Macintosh division; and in 2005, he was named the chief operating officer, overseeing worldwide sales and operations, as well as the Macintosh division.
By early 2009, Cook was Apple’s highest-paid executive and essentially the de facto CEO of the company. With so many responsibilities, Cook had effectively been running Apple for several years, allowing Jobs to concentrate on new product development and strategic issues like cutting deals with record labels and movie studios.
“Tim runs Apple and he has been running Apple for a long time now,” Michael Janes, a former colleague of Cook’s, told Wired.com.1 “Steve is the face of the company and very involved with product development but Tim is the guy who takes all those designs and turns it into a big pile of cash for the company.”
Like Jobs, Cook has working-class roots. He was raised in a modest home in a small town in Alabama. His father was a retired shipyard worker and his mother, a homemaker. He studied industrial engineering at Auburn University and earned an MBA from Duke University.
Cook, like Jobs, had had a brush with death, in 1996, when he was misdiagnosed with multiple sclerosis, an experience that reportedly shook him to the core. After the misdiagnosis, Cook became fanatical about his health, eating well and working out at the gym. He took up long-distance road biking and weight lifting.
Also like Jobs, Cook is a workaholic. Putting in long hours, he frequently conducts early-morning meetings or late-night conference calls, especially when working with Apple’s overseas suppliers.
If he’s not working, he’s working out. Cook’s work at Apple is his life. He’s unmarried, keeps to himself, and is not known for partying. He rarely makes appearances at Silicon Valley social events and infrequently gives speeches at industry conferences. He does reportedly give a lot of money to charity—though strictly anonymously. Making a fuss or drawing attention is not his style.
But where Jobs is emotional and volatile, Cook is quiet and soft-spoken. Thanks to his Alabama roots, he comes across like a Southern gentleman who is impeccably polite. He has reportedly never raised his voice in anger—an incredible claim, especially given Jobs’s reputation for having a nasty temper.
Yet Cook has a low-key authority. He commands enormous respect and loyalty from coworkers and competitors alike. Those who have worked with him say he is a good leader. He gives clear and simple instructions and rewards people with praise or gifts when they do a good job. He is action oriented and extremely well organized. His late-night meetings are often spent poring meticulously over pages and pages of numbers.
Unlike Jobs, Cook is also known to use humor in order to defuse potentially tense situations. At one big sales meeting, he gave the worst sales team a toilet plunger as a gag prize. Jobs would probably have threatened to fire the lot of them.
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