What were you doing in 1998? Tim Cook had just been recruited to work in a senior leadership role at the world’s largest personal-computer company.
Plot twist: The company was not Apple; at the time, the world’s largest personal-computer company was Compaq.
Do readers even remember Compaq? Hewlett-Packard acquired it a few years later.
Anyway, Cook changed his mind after just six months and left to join Steve Jobs at Apple, as I think most of us know. In a 2010 speech at his alma mater, Auburn University, he explained his thinking at the time:
Any purely rational consideration of cost and benefits lined up in Compaq’s favor …
But there are times in our lives when the careful consideration of cost and benefits just doesn’t seem like the right way to make a decision.
There are times in all of our lives when a reliance on gut or intuition just seems more appropriate — when a particular course of action just feels right.
It was obviously a pretty good decision. Of course, Cook became Jobs’s choice to replace him when Jobs’s health deteriorated—ultimately the key to a succession plan that Jobs was able to set it in motion with just a single sentence in a letter to the company’s board, when his health took a turn:
“I strongly recommend that we execute our succession plan and name Tim Cook as CEO of Apple.”
That was late August 2011; earlier this month, 15 years later, was Cook’s last day as CEO.
I can’t imagine anyone in our lifetimes thinking of anyone besides Jobs as the visionary behind Apple. But Apple is a much bigger and more influential company now than it was when Cook took over.
Under his leadership:
Apple introduced products such as the Apple Watch and AirPods. It moved the Mac onto Apple-designed chips, and now has 1.5 billion paid subscriptions.
Its revenue grew from roughly $101 billion when Cook took over to $467 billion. Its stock rose 2,296 percent, and the company added $4.32 trillion in market value.
Today, more than 2.5 billion Apple devices are active around the world.
Cook isn’t actually leaving Apple; he’s now executive chairman. Still, it’s a major milestone, and he wrote an open letter to the entire company marking the occasion.
There’s a lot of good in it, but two things stood out to me.
The first was this nine-word sentence: “This place is proof that culture triumphs over everything.“
We share a belief that what we build matters. …
Apple helps nurture it, but I believe it lived within each of you long before you arrived here.
It is what brought you to this company and what continues to drive the work you do every day.
But I think it’s also a compliment to Cook, and a significant leadership lesson.
Because there’s an organizational size beyond which a leader can’t really lead through individual influence. I’m not sure exactly what the cutoff is, but it’s a tiny fraction of the 166,000 people who work for Apple.
And as a result, as pithy as this sounds, it’s true: A leader’s most powerful tool is the ability to inspire culture.
Put differently (and I think I might have been the person who coined this phrase): “Culture is leadership at scale.”
Anyway, John Ternus is now CEO. And since Cook spent 28 years at Apple, I guess we’ll have to wait another 28 years to answer the real question about what he built.
In 2054, will Apple still reign? Or will it have turned into the Compaq of the middle of the 21st century?
I have a feeling culture will play a very big part.
Other things worth knowing …
AP: President Trump said U.S. and Iranian officials met on Tuesday, shortly after he threatened in his address to the U.N. General Assembly that he may “annihilate” the Islamic Republic if a deal isn’t reached soon to end the nearly seven-month war. Trump told reporters about the meeting but offered few details about the talks.
Bloomberg via Yahoo Finance: Opposition to data centers continues to mount in the U.S., with some 45 data center projects worth $68 billion blocked or delayed by local pushback between April and June this year, according to research group Data Center Watch. President Trump has dismissed opposition to data centers and concern about advances in AI as a “sick conspiracy,” saying “the only one that is happy about it is China.”
WaPo via Yahoo: “I am the code”: How President Trump clashed with the White House ballroom architect over safety issues.
NYT: Princeton’s run atop U.S. News rankings ends after 15 years. MIT pulled ahead on a set of criteria that are as contentious as they are influential.
The Independent: President David Adeang announced to the United Nations General Assembly that the South Pacific island nation of Nauru is reverting to its traditional name, Naoero. The shift reflects the name used internally by the island’s inhabitants rather than the foreign adaptation.
International Living: Here are the five cheapest places for people to retire abroad, according to a new report. They’re all in Asia: Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Thailand, Bali, and Malaysia.
AP: After a summer spent packing away sockeye salmon, Alaska’s heftiest brown bears are ready to throw their weight around. Online voting began Tuesday for Fat Bear Week, the annual contest that pits the rotund residents of Katmai National Park and Preserve against each other for the title of most oversized ursine.
Thanks for reading. Photo by Kym Meure on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. See you in the comments!
“Culture is leadership at scale” made me wonder about the mechanism underneath it. Once an organization is too large for a leader to influence people directly, what actually carries that influence? What gets repeated, rewarded, tolerated, noticed? Maybe culture is partly the accumulation of those signals over time.
I think that we will most likely see that Apple has already started losing its "it" factor and that in 20 years we will identify this period as when Apple started its IBM like fall from leadership. Apple used to be product lead, focus on creating new awe inspiring products that even if consumers didn't know that needed, once they saw them, they wanted them. Now Apple is another company that has decided to focus on making its investors happy and has become a finance company, not a product company any more. I really wish that someone would write a piece on how PE firms destroy many more firms than they create. Not that PE is at play with Apple, but the change from product oriented to finance oriented, a PE staple, is. Cook was still a product oriented guy, the new leadership team does not appear to have that vision.