‘Replace Steve?
No. He’s irreplaceable. That’s something people have to get over’, Tim Cook, November 2008
Although his boss had already undergone
treatment for liver cancer, Apple’s chief operating officer was optimistic,
reported Fortune magazine. ‘I see Steve there with grey hair in his 70s, long
after I’m retired’. But within three months, Cook would be standing in as CEO
for a second time; and on 24 August 2011, the job became permanent.
‘Replace Steve?
No. He’s irreplaceable. That’s something people have to get over’, Tim Cook,
November 2008
Such was Cook’s reputation, endorsed by
Jobs, that the markets barely waved. But as time goes on, the questions begin
to mount. It was true, of course, that nobody could ever replace Steve Jobs. No
other CEO would be the man who founded Apple, oversaw the launch of the Mac,
then returned to save the company from a financial tailspin and build it into
one of the most profitable in history.
Tim
Cook – New Apple CEO
Less obvious was that the successor to the
tech industry’s most conspicuous, abrasive, flamboyant, idiosyncratic,
autocratic, divisive and deified figure would be a quiet, focused operations
guy whose achievements until now had rarely made even the trade pages.
Where the history and personality of Steve
Jobs were endlessly documented, the public background of Apple’s new CEO is
short on facts, let alone myths. Born in 1960 in Alabama, Cook graduated in
science and took an MBA at Duke University (Melinda Gates was a contemporary).
His rise through the electronics industry was rather less meteoric than that of
his mercurial predecessor.
Twelve years at IBM were rewarded with
responsibility for North American fulfillment, leading to a VP position in the
computer reseller division of Intelligent Electronics, where he was then
promoted to the board as chief operating officer. Though successful, the
company’s somewhat mundane business was selling computers, not making them, and
it splintered in 1997 as the
A little more than six months after jumping
ship to Compaq, then a PC industry leviathan, Cook was poached on behalf of
Jobs – who’s just returned to the company from which he’d been ousted in 1985 –
to manage supply chain: the process of manufacturing and delivering hardware
products.
This may all sound rather dull, and it’s
hard to ignore the fact that even Cook’s move to Apple was passively initiated.
A firm of headhunters approached him, as he later told his home-state trade
paper, Business Alabama: ‘I was happy at Compaq, but they eventually talked me
into meeting with them. He (Jobs) needed a manager of operations’. Not the
stuff of legend.
For
Cook, thus far a steady corporate climber, to throw in his lot with a
struggling rival was akin to an Apple sales VP in 2012 leaving to work for Dell
Yet in moving from Compaq to Apple, Cook
took a breakthrough leap of faith. Despite a good deal of press interest
generated by Job’s return, the company was still on the slide, and the iMac,
the first tangible sign of a new vision for its future, had yet to materialize.
For Cook, thus far a steady corporate climber, to throw in his lot with a
struggling rival was akin to an Apple sales VP in 2012 leaving to work for
Dell, or an iPhone product manager deciding BlackBerry maker RIM was really the
hot ticket.
In a commencement address at his alma
mater, Auburn University, in 2010, Cook painted an epiphanic picture of this
decision. ‘On that day, in early 1998, I listened to my intuition. Not the left
side of my brain, or for that matter even the people who knew me best. It’s
hard to know why I listened. I’m not even sure why I know today, but no more
than five minutes into my initial interview with Steve, I wanted to throw
caution and logic to the wind and join Apple’.
Caution and logic were not quite so
emphatically absent from the account given to Business Alabama 11 years
previously. ‘I decided at that point that I wanted to go to work at Apple. It
was just a matter of making the numbers work. Once we negotiated to where it
was to both of our advantages, everything fell into place… I saw this as chance
to participate in a corporate turnaround’.
Perhaps this was a rationalisation after
the event. Even in 1999, Cook recalled having made his choice within five
minutes. Something, evidently, clicked. It’s frustratingly unclear, however,
whether he found in Jobs a kindred spirit or just a role model. Too little is
known of Cook’s management style or decision-making before that day to confirm
or refute his own 1999 claim that ‘I tend to go with my instinct quite often.
My instincts have never let me down’.
Was this, again, an artifact of hindsight?
Did Cook see in Jobs a reflection of some long-suppressed impulsive iconoclasm,
or merely a new figure to copy neatly onto the palimpsest of his own ambition?
