Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs

by Yukari Iwatani Kane

  Cook was a seasoned businessman and arguably a better manager than Jobs. He was organized, prepared, and was more realistic about the burdens of a company of Apple’s current size. Many even considered him to be a genius in his own right. But no one could beat Jobs at being Steve Jobs, especially Cook, who was his polar opposite.

  Together, the two men had struck the perfect balance. If Jobs was the star, then Cook was the stage manager. If Jobs was idealistic, Cook was practical. “Steve and Tim were very different people,” one executive who worked closely with them said, adding that Cook would haggle over a nickel to drive profits whereas Jobs would spend a nickel to make people happy. “Tim was very much, ‘Hey, we can’t do that,’ and Steve was like, ‘We have to!’ ”

  Jobs trusted Cook because he lacked any external demonstration of ego. Even when Cook disagreed with Jobs, he had mostly done so privately and cleverly. Rarely did he directly oppose Jobs. Instead, he proposed possible alternative solutions in a conciliatory manner, often with data to support him. “He was super smart about handling Steve,” said Mike Slade, who worked with Cook as an advisor in the late 1990s.

  Without Jobs, however, Cook had no counterweight to his dogged pragmatism. Who would provide the creative sparks?

  For more than a decade, Cook had served his master. He set up and managed a world-leading supply chain system that could mass-produce Apple’s groundbreaking products perfectly, profitably, and quickly. Whatever Jobs wanted, he made happen. When executive recruiters had come calling with CEO positions at Dell and Motorola, Cook had politely turned them down. He loved Apple and had no plans to leave, he would say, adding that he was perfectly content to be second-in-command.

  But underneath the demure denials were hints of grand ambition. One of Cook’s favorite quotes was one from Abraham Lincoln. “I will prepare and someday my chance will come.” It was this belief that had led him to study industrial engineering, join IBM, then Compaq, and finally Apple. He had prepared and waited with seemingly infinite patience. Now his moment had arrived.

  Still, the succession was complicated by the fact that no one knew who Cook really was. The new CEO was a cipher, a blank slate. As far as anyone could tell, he had no close friends, never socialized, and rarely talked about his personal life. Even physically, he didn’t stand out. He was tall and lean with broad shoulders, pale skin, and graying hair. He wore barely noticeable rimless glasses and favored button-down shirts and polos. The most distinguishable part of his attire was his Nike sneakers, chosen because he sat on that company’s board.

  When an interviewer asked him what kind of a leader he was, he dodged the answer, saying, “I’d let other people describe me.”

  By design, he remained a complete mystery.

  Cook was full of contradictions. To some, he was a machine. To others, he was riveting. He could strike terror in the hearts of his subordinates, but he could also motivate them into toiling from dawn to midnight just for a word of praise.

  No one considered Cook to be antisocial, but neither would they describe him as social. He was friendly and pleasant, and those with passing interactions saw him as a gentle southerner with an aura similar to Mr. Rogers. But he wasn’t approachable.

  “I’m a hugger and a kisser,” said Gina Gloski, a college classmate, who had sat on the alumni council with Cook. “But I’d never feel comfortable giving Tim a hug or a kiss.” When one of his high school teachers emailed to congratulate him on a big promotion at Apple, he didn’t respond.

  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 campus and didn’t fraternize outside of work. Years before, when Apple was about to ship its movie editing software, iMovie, Jobs wanted the executive team to test it out by making home movies. Jobs’s was about his kids, and hardware executive Jon Rubinstein’s poked fun at the meetings he had to attend on his birthday. Cook made his about house hunting and how little one got for their money in Palo Alto in the late 1990s. While amusing, the movie revealed nothing about him.

  Few people knew how close Cook was to his family. His colleagues were aware that he went home occasionally, but most of them had no idea that he called his mother every week.

  “He calls every Sunday, no matter what, no matter where he’s at,” Cook’s father had told a television reporter in 2009 as he sat in a La-Z-Boy chair. “Europe, Asia, no matter where he’s at, he calls his mother every Sunday. He don’t miss a one.”

  After the interview, his father handed the TV reporter a bag of Satsuma oranges that he had picked from his backyard.

  His parents were still living in Robertsdale, Alabama, the small, predominantly white rural town near the Gulf of Mexico where they had raised Cook. Their brick ranch house stood on a dead-end road in a pleasant middle-class neighborhood. Neatly trimmed evergreen bushes and a few flowers adorned the front side. The living room was modest with family photos and memorabilia, including track-and-field trophies that Cook had won as a child. A pair of Korean dolls wearing hanboks, the national costume, sat on the mantel as a souvenir from one of Cook’s many business trips to Seoul. The only fancy item was a flat-screen television on their wall that was connected to a DirecTV satellite dish. There was no computer in sight. His parents considered themselves to be too old to learn how to use one.

  The Cooks were proud of all three of their sons, but their middle child, Tim, was the town’s biggest success story even before he was named CEO. In December 2008, shortly before Jobs went on leave for the second time, Donald and Geraldine Cook walked into the offices of their local newspaper, the Independent, and offered an interview about their son.

  “I am proud he has done so well,” his mother told the reporter assigned to conduct the impromptu interview. “Nobody helped him.”

  “He’s a workaholic,” added her husband. They talked affectionately about how he stopped at the gym every morning to work out.

  When Apple’s media relations department found out that the Independent was planning to publish a story about the interview, they asked the editor not to publish it, to preserve Cook’s privacy. Recognizing that they had a scoop on Robertsdale’s most famous son, the newspaper refused. But to mollify the corporate giant, it kept the piece off the front page.

  Most reporters who covered Silicon Valley had never interviewed Cook. At his request, his parents soon stopped speaking to journalists as well. When their son was named CEO, they referred all press inquiries to the family’s pastor.

  For a man who craved invisibility, Cook could not have had a more perfect childhood. His southern upbringing was so ordinary that the guardians of secrecy in Apple’s public relations department could have scripted it. Those who would later turn to his early days for clues would find little to crack the code. That his unknowability had taken root so young only added to his aura.

  During his early years, Cook’s family lived in Pensacola, Florida, on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Cook’s father worked at a shipyard for Alabama Drydock, rising to assistant general foreman. His mother was a homemaker. Eventually they moved to Robertsdale, a small town thirty-eight miles northwest of the city. Donald Cook later explained in an interview that he and his wife had chosen Robertsdale for its schools.

  Though he did not disclose the exact date, the family’s move appears to have been in the early seventies, a time when many families were fleeing Pensacola due to escalating racial strife over desegregation in the public schools. Cook later spoke of the terrible discrimination he had witnessed growing up. In historically white schools, teachers still routinely referred to the Civil War as the War of Northern Aggression. At Escambia High School, the old traditions died especially hard. In 1972, three years after integration became the law, the school band infuriated black students by flying the Confederate flag and playing “Dixie.” The tensions, which erupted in a riot at an Escambia football game, continued for the next several years.

  Terrified at the prospect
of further violence, many families began moving out of the school district. At the time, Tim Cook was in middle school. His photo first appears in a Robertsdale school yearbook in 1972 at the end of his sixth-grade year. Robertsdale was quiet, stable, and so safe it bordered on boring. Outsiders found the place easy to forget because it was literally a stop on their way to the beach. Known as “Hub City” for its central location in Baldwin County, Robertsdale was the kind of town where people’s social lives revolved around church, the Golden Bears high school football team, and seasonal events like the Shrimp Festival in nearby Gulf Shores. About the only thing that ruffled the town’s calm was the advent of hurricane season. Living so close to the Gulf, the residents held their breath as they watched the barometer and studied the horizon. The closest call during Cook’s adolescence was Hurricane Eloise, a storm that made landfall near Panama City in 1975 and passed just to the east of the town, tearing up the area with top winds of up to 155 miles per hour.

  For the most part, life in Robertsdale followed a predictable routine. Christmas was marked with a parade and visits from Santa, sponsored by Delta Chi. Dewy girls competed in the Junior Miss pageant. Methodist youth groups climbed onto buses headed for Six Flags. The stylists at Emma’s Hair Fashions sought advice at the hair show in Panama City; the Southern Life Insurance Company went to Pensacola for the district picnic. At summer’s end, the residents slathered butter over ears of freshly harvested corn. In the fall, they lay in bed and listened for the soft clatter of pecans falling on roofs.

  The Independent treated rattlesnake bites as big news, especially if the offending fangs came from the mouth of a five-foot-long diamondback. When the local grocery store, Morgan’s Corner, was sold to Piggly Wiggly, the paper was all over it. A front-page story detailed the experiences of a priest visiting from his home parish in Ireland. The headline: STAND-IN PRIEST NOW LEARNING TO DRIVE ON RIGHT SIDE OF ROAD.

  Inside the pages, columnists faithfully recorded Bible camps, surprise birthday parties, visits to great-grandmothers in Georgia, spaghetti dinners, updates on residents recovering from surgery, backyard barbecues enjoyed by out-of-town guests, as well as the names of the ladies who attended a coffee for Mrs. Fob James at the Lake Forest Country Club. No item was too small.

  “Thursday’s Bridge Club,” one story reported, “was held in Mrs. Juanita Freeman’s home with Iris Malone winning high and Corina White winning bingo.”

  The Independent’s voluminous coverage was well-intentioned, even sweet. But growing up in this environment, Cook could be forgiven if he developed an aversion to the public reporting of private life. Not that he had a problem with newspapers. As a teenager, he made extra money delivering for the Press-Register. Along with his mother, he also worked part-time at the local pharmacy, Lee Drugs, where he waited on customers and stocked shelves. Friends and teachers remembered him being confident and funny.

  “He wasn’t quiet at all,” said high school classmate Susan Baker. “I don’t know a soul who didn’t like him.”

  Where Cook really excelled was in the classroom. The public school taught kindergarten through twelfth grade, all in one U-shaped, redbrick building. The annual talent show was dubbed Bunny’s Good Time Hour after Barbara Davis, a popular teacher whose nickname was Bunny. Cook never participated.

  From a young age, he showed a drive to succeed. Exhibiting an early aptitude for analytics, his favorite subjects were algebra, geometry, and trigonometry.

  “He was a good problem solver,” recalled Davis, who taught Cook math for three years. “He would stick with something until he got it.”

  He was conscientious even in subjects like typing. His teacher would use a sheet of paper to cover the fingers of students who looked at the keys too much, but she never had to do that with Cook. “He was so concerned about his grades,” said Dolores Teem. “I just told him, ‘Do what I tell you and you’re going to do fine.’ ”

  From seventh through twelfth grade, he was voted “most studious.” He represented his town at Boys State, an American Legion mock legislature program, and won the Optimist Oratorical contest on the theme “Give Me Your Hand.” In his junior year, he won a contest organized by the Alabama Rural Electric Association by writing an essay on the topic “Rural Electric Cooperatives—Challengers of Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow.” First prize was an all-expense paid trip to Washington, D.C., where he attended banquets, visited sites like Arlington National Cemetery, and heard President Jimmy Carter speak at the White House. Had he won second prize, he would have received a savings bond.

  “He’s the kind of fella who don’t believe in giving up on nothing,” Cook’s father told the local CBS affiliate, WKRG. “He’s a go-getter.”

  Outside of class, Cook played the trombone in the school band, which performed at football games, parades, and school dances and was considered the town’s mainstay of musical entertainment. The band practiced every Tuesday and Thursday after school. Wednesdays were reserved for families going to church. Cook also worked on the Robala yearbook staff, where he served as business manager. Davis, who was also the yearbook advisor, chose him for the job because she knew he was meticulous and good with numbers.

  Like so many high school yearbooks, then and now, the Robala steered clear of controversy and ambiguity with the slightest hint of teen angst. Nearly every page radiated a dedication to portraying the school in the most idealized light possible.

  Scanning the volumes from Cook’s high school years takes the reader on a forced march through the fashion wasteland of the mid-seventies: helmet hair, leisure suits, bell bottoms, even silk screen shirts with psychedelic prints. Like the rest of the nation’s youth, the students of Robertsdale High cried out for a mass intervention. The year after Star Wars hit theaters, the book showed one girl sporting Princess Leia’s signature cinnamon buns, seemingly without a trace of irony. Cook was not immune to the ravages of the age. His photos show him smiling awkwardly beneath giant waves of hair, his gangly frame squeezed into printed button-down shirts and loud checkered slacks. In his junior yearbook, a photo showed him listening to a tape with a pair of large headphones next to a classmate on an electric typewriter. “Teresa and Tim,” the caption read, “are using two of the modern ways to help study.” In another, Cook stood next to his friend Lisa as her escort in the Homecoming Court.

  Decades later, Robertsdale’s mayor, Charles Murphy, would speak proudly of their native son. “It’s a big honor for us, someone who was raised here, it just shows that through hard work and diligent effort what you can accomplish.”

  He added, however, that he had met Cook only once. When the executive returned home for a visit, he did so quietly. A cashier at Lee Drugs said his parents still patronized the store, but she had never met their son. “I’ve seen him on television,” she said. “He favors his daddy.”

  Cook had always wanted to be an engineer, and after graduating in 1978, he enrolled in the industrial engineering program at Auburn University, a school whose football team he had been a fan of since he was a child. Where he came from, you were devoted to either the Auburn Tigers or the University of Alabama’s Crimson Tide. Even back then, Cook had an affinity for underdogs, and the Tigers qualified.

  The future Apple executive couldn’t have picked a more suitable major to start on the road that would eventually lead him to Cupertino. Industrial engineers optimize complex processes or systems. In contrast to other types of engineers who focus on specific technical problems, industrial engineers look at the big picture to eliminate waste and figure out the most efficient use of resources. This training makes them exceptionally qualified to move into management. Former Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca, Wal-Mart Stores CEO Mike Duke, and former United Parcel Service CEO Michael Eskew all came from industrial engineering backgrounds.

  Cook did well in college but didn’t stand out. He tended to sit in the middle of the classroom and rarely asked questions or visited professors during office hours.

  “I had no visions of gran
deur for him,” admitted Saeed Maghsoodloo, one of his professors. He added that it was difficult to predict a student’s success at such a young age. “He quietly did everything by himself, and as far as I remember, he was at least a solid B-plus or A-minus student.”

  Some of his teachers recalled his innate talent in one particular area. He was faster than anyone else at identifying problems in case studies.

  “He could cut through all the junk and get down to the gist of the problem very quickly,” said another professor, Robert Bulfin. “I suspect that has served him very well.”

  Auburn had a reputation for being tight-knit. Students mostly came from Alabama or neighboring southern states, and their shared backgrounds, coupled with the school’s relatively isolated location and strong football culture, bound them together. The school referred to its community often as the “Auburn family.” Its guiding principle was the Auburn Creed. “I believe that this is a practical world and that I can count only on what I earn,” it began. “Therefore, I believe in work, hard work. I believe in education, which gives me the knowledge to work wisely and trains my mind and my hands to work skillfully. I believe in honesty and truthfulness, without which I cannot win the respect and confidence of my fellow men.”