Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs

by Yukari Iwatani Kane

  The vow, written by Auburn’s first football coach, George Petrie, was brutally pragmatic, especially its first two sentences, which resonated strongly with Cook. Nearly thirty years later, he would tell students in a commencement address at Auburn that for as long as he could remember, the line “I believe in work, hard work” had formed one of his core beliefs.

  “Though the sentiment is a simple one, there’s tremendous dignity and wisdom in these words and they have stood the test of time,” Cook had said. “Those who try to achieve success without hard work ultimately deceive themselves, or worse, deceive others.”

  This work ethic would come to define him as he built his career.

  Cook’s experience at Auburn also helped him in a more tangible way. Partially to offset his tuition, Cook enrolled in a cooperative education program in which he spent part of his time working at Reynolds Aluminum in Richmond, Virginia. While he was there, the company laid off most of its employees, giving him the opportunity to fill in and run the company alongside the president. It was his first taste of corporate management. A later stint at the Scott Paper Company gave him insight into another traditional industry. In his senior year Cook was nominated as outstanding industrial engineering graduate. “I don’t deserve this,” he said then. “There are any number of people who deserve this more than me.”

  An IBM recruiter who happened to be present hired him. The computer giant was one of three potential employers Cook had been considering. The other two had been Andersen Consulting and General Electric.

  “The truth is, I’d never thought much about computers. It just sort of happened,” he recalled years later. “Would things have turned out different if that hadn’t happened? I don’t know. But I do know that there are only a very few things in life that define you and that was one of them for me.”

  Decades later, he would talk about how uncertain he was about his future at his graduation. When IBM sent him to Duke for an MBA, he had even drawn up a twenty-five-year plan as part of an exercise.

  “Let’s just say it wasn’t worth the yellowed paper it was written on,” he told graduating Auburn seniors in 2010. “Life has a habit of throwing you curveballs. Don’t get me wrong—it’s good to plan for the future, but if you’re like me and you occasionally want to swing for the fences, you can’t count on a predictable life.”

  Life under Jobs was a roller coaster, but Cook’s operations fiefdom 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 line item. Even a small miss of a couple of hundred units was examined closely. “Your numbers,” he said flatly to one planner, “make me want to jump out that window over there.”

  In another meeting he wanted to know why a manager in Ireland wasn’t teleconferencing in. “Where’s Joe?” he asked as he slowly crushed a can of soda in his hand.

  His subordinates quickly learned to plan rigorously for meetings with him almost as if they were studying for a school exam. They built financial models and prepared detailed budget estimates.

  “If you ever spent money without it being fully approved all the way to the highest level,” recalled one staffer who worked under him, “it was a serious fucking infraction.”

  Meetings with Cook could be terrifying. There was occasionally idle chitchat, but it was mostly nervous chatter. Cook, who exuded a Zen-like calm, didn’t waste words.

  “Talk about your numbers. Put your spreadsheet up,” he’d say as he nursed a Mountain Dew at his side. It was a puzzle to his staff why he wasn’t bouncing off the walls from the caffeine.

  When Cook turned the spotlight on someone, he hammered him with questions until he was satisfied. “Why is that?” “What do you mean?” “I don’t understand. Why are you not making it clear?” Bam, bam, bam.

  He was known to ask the same exact question ten times in a row, but he also knew the power of silence. Cook could do more with a pause than Jobs ever could with a swear word. When he wanted something done, he would just stop talking and expect the other person to fill the void. When someone was unable to answer a question, he would sit there without a word while people stared at the table and shifted in their seats. The atmosphere was so intense and uncomfortable that it made everyone in the room want to back away. Cook, however, didn’t move a finger as he focused his eyes on his target. As the person squirmed in his seat, the room would be dead still. Sometimes, an unperturbed Cook would take out an energy bar from his pocket while he waited for an answer. The silence would be broken by the crackling of a wrapper.

  Regular attendees swore that his pulse never rose as he barbecued his victims. His people learned to never let him get to the third “Why?”

  Cook had little tolerance for people who weren’t doing what they were supposed to be doing, be they on his team or at one of the suppliers. “When we would work with companies, he’d always want to know who was the man in charge,” recalled one longtime operations manager. “That was his big thing.”

  Even in Apple’s unrelenting culture, Cook’s meetings stood out as harsh. On one occasion, a manager from the hardware group who was sitting in was shocked to hear Cook say to an underling, “That number is wrong. Get out of here.” Hardware meetings were tough, too, but participants were never treated like that.

  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, meanwhile, 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. Even as they quaked, however, they marveled at how effectively he used fear and controlled tension to get results. His tough approach commanded respect because he set the same high bar for himself.

  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 diet was so predictable that when he and hardware chief Jon Rubinstein were traveling together, Rubinstein could order for him. During one business dinner at MacArthur Park restaurant in Palo Alto, Rubinstein proved it. “He’ll take the salad with the dressing on the side and bring him the fish with the sauce on the side,” he said to the waiter.

  As everyone laughed, Cook confirmed the order. “Yes, that’s what I’ll have.”

  Rubinstein ordered a full rack of ribs and a side of fries.

  His stamina was so inhuman that some wondered if he was actually human. Cook worked twelve to fourteen hours a day but insisted he was not a workaholic. Prior to Monday’s executive team meetings, he would hold prep meetings on Friday afternoons and recap meetings on Sunday evenings. He could fly to Asia, spend three days, fly back, arrive at 7 a.m. at the airport, and be in the office by 8:30, interrogating someone about some numbers. During one eighteen-hour flight from California to Singapore several years before, Cook had stayed awake the entire time, preparing for a review of Apple’s Asian operations as he soared over the Pacific. When the plane landed at dawn, he took a quick shower and headed into a twelve-hour meeting. By the end, the local executives were exhausted, but he wanted to keep going.

  Cook was also relentlessly frugal. Though he could afford better, for many years he chose to live in a rental unit in a dingy ranch-style building with no air-conditioning. He said it reminded him of where he came from. 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. He bought underwear at Nordstrom’s half-yearly sale, and his first sports car was a used Porsche Boxster, an entry-level sports car that enthusiasts called the “poor man’s Porsche.” When he mentioned his new acquisition at a staff meeting, one of his more outspoken managers expressed surprise.

  “Tim, what the hell? You can afford any car, anything, and you bought a used P
orsche Boxster?”

  “No, you know . . . ,” Cook had said, not really answering.

  Even his hobbies were hard-core—cycling and rock climbing. During vacations, he never ventured far. Two of his favorite places to visit were Yosemite and Zion. He was once spotted at Canyon Ranch Resort in Arizona, where he kept to himself, often dining alone reading on his iPad. Once when Joe O’Sullivan was recounting tales from a vacation in India he had just taken, Cook wistfully commented, “I’d love to do that.”

  “Well, why don’t you?” O’Sullivan answered. “You’re only young once, you know.”

  Cook’s response: “I will sometime.”

  With his colleagues, Cook generally kept a professional distance. When they invited him to join them for social events, he wouldn’t say no, but he never said yes.

  “That’s a good idea,” he’d say noncommittally.

  Cook also was a lifelong bachelor who never mentioned friends or romantic interests. Some blogs speculated that he was gay, and Out magazine ranked him as number one in its Annual Power 50 above Ellen DeGeneres for three straight years, but Cook himself never confirmed or denied the fact. In any case, his sexual orientation was irrelevant. Cook had little personal time. He might as well have been married to Apple.

  Cook occasionally showed flashes of his old humor as he revealed the humble Alabama boy inside. Once when he was schlepping from one end of London’s Heathrow Airport to the other to transfer planes during a business trip, his traveling companion was amused to hear him muttering under his breath, “Now I understand why people have private jets.” Later when they were finally seated in the airport lounge, he took a package of cookies, looked at it, and wanted to know why they were called digestives. “Are these something I need to be careful of?” he asked. When he was reassured that it was just a type of British cookie, he joked, “With a name like digestives, I didn’t know what I was going to be eating.”

  Even those who were witness to some of those moments, however, didn’t know much about him aside from the fact that he was a die-hard Auburn Tigers football fan and admired Lance Armstrong, at least until the athlete admitted to doping. Cook’s office was decorated with Auburn paraphernalia, and he reportedly modeled his close-cropped haircut after the seven-time Tour de France winner. One of his favorite quotes by the cyclist was “I don’t like to lose. I just despise it.” Cook had put up a slide of the phrase in an operations meeting once.

  “In business, as in sports, the vast majority of victories are determined before the beginning of the game,” he had said in his commencement speech at Auburn. “We rarely control the timing of opportunities, but we can control our preparation.”

  Like Jobs, Cook claimed to be a Bob Dylan fan. Unlike Jobs, it was difficult to imagine him cuing up “Subterranean Homesick Blues” on his iPod. Though he had grown up in a conservative part of the country, he considered Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. to be among his heroes. Photos of both men hung in his office, and he told interviewers that he took inspiration from their example. “I always felt that Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King did an incredible amount for the whole of the world,” he told business school students at his MBA alma mater, Duke. “They didn’t solve it because it’s not solved today, but they moved things forward in a major way. . . . And they knowingly risked their lives for it.”

  On a different occasion, Cook said that he admired the way Kennedy had been comfortable standing in his brother’s shadow, doing what he thought was right. He said he was “tormented” at times by thinking about how things might have changed had the civil rights activist become president. “He had a way of touching and relating to people of all walks of life,” Cook had said. “He was one of the people who got close enough to the presidency who really loved people, who wanted to raise people up.” Kennedy embodied everything that Cook strived to be—hardworking, principled, and charitable.

  As tough as Cook was reputed to be, he was also generous. He gave away the frequent-flyer miles that he racked up as Christmas gifts, and he volunteered at a soup kitchen during the Thanksgiving holidays. At Auburn, he helped found an advisory committee of industry leaders for the Engineering Department, gave money for a scholarship, and contributed to a fund that helped the department buy new equipment and technology. In the past, he had participated in an annual two-day cycling event across Georgia to raise money for multiple sclerosis. Cook had been a supporter since he was misdiagnosed with the disease years before. “The doctor said, ‘Mr. Cook, you’ve either had a stroke or you have MS.’ Turned out, I didn’t have either one. I was just lugging a lot of incredibly heavy luggage around,” Cook told his alumni magazine in an interview, adding that the incident put the world in a different perspective.

  “I’ve already done more than I ever thought I’d do. If you start fearing things, then you don’t try anything new or different. If it doesn’t work out, it’s not the end of my world. I’ll go ride my bike.”

  Jobs’s departure presented a crisis for the company. But it was also an opportunity for Cook to assume control in a way he hadn’t been permitted to in the past. In August 2011, a few months before Jobs passed away, Cook sent his first email as CEO to employees.

  Team:

  I am looking forward to the amazing opportunity of serving as CEO of the most innovative company in the world. Joining Apple was the best decision I’ve ever made and it’s been the privilege of a lifetime to work for Apple and Steve for over 13 years. I share Steve’s optimism for Apple’s bright future.

  Steve has been an incredible leader and mentor to me, as well as to the entire executive team and our amazing employees. We are really looking forward to Steve’s ongoing guidance and inspiration as our Chairman.

  I want you to be confident that Apple is not going to change. I cherish and celebrate Apple’s unique principles and values. 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. We are going to continue to make the best products in the world that delight our customers and make our employees incredibly proud of what they do.

  I love Apple and I am looking forward to diving into my new role. All of the incredible support from the Board, the executive team and many of you has been inspiring. 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.

  Tim

  Apple’s employees rallied around Cook in the days following, but privately there was considerable anxiety about how Apple might be run. Employees in departments that had little to do with Cook until then 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 took two immediate actions. First, he promoted Eddy Cue, Apple’s enormously popular vice president for Internet services. Cue had started out as an intern. In one version of a story that he told everyone, he was plucked out of the IT department by Jobs during a meeting in which he had dared to voice an opinion about the topic at hand. When Jobs looked at him and told him to shut up, an undeterred Cue spoke up again, causing Jobs to throw a pen at his forehead. Cue, who by then figured he had nothing to lose, braced himself and offered up his opinion for a third time. This time, he won Jobs’s approval.

  From that moment on, Cue became Jobs’s guy, managing the iTunes group, and then eventually all of Internet services. He was Jobs’s deal maker as well, leading the initial talks with AT&T when Apple was launching the iPhone and negotiating content deals with the music labels, movie studios, book publishers, and media companies. Cue was the face of Apple for its partners. He wasn’t a pushover, but he was accessible, attentive, and always willing to listen. He was also a genuinely nice guy who loved fast cars and religiously followed his alma mater Duke University’s basketball team.

  Without him, Apple would have found it more difficult to provide the breadth of Internet services and content that the comp
any offered.

  For all of Cue’s importance, Jobs had never promoted him beyond vice president. Some thought that Jobs didn’t consider services to be a core part of Apple, worthy of a senior vice president status, but Cue had been welcomed inside the inner circle for years. Everyone in the company was united in their belief that he should have been promoted years ago. Cook’s appointment of Cue as senior vice president may have been obvious and possibly even pre-planned, but the decision generated goodwill inside and outside the company at a crucial time when Cook was still forming his public image. He also had turned an important Jobs loyalist into an ally on his executive team.

  The second decision Cook made was to start a charity program. He announced that Apple would match charitable donations of up to ten thousand dollars, dollar for dollar annually. This, too, was embraced. The lack of a corporate matching program had been a sore point for many employees. Jobs didn’t believe in philanthropy because he thought money was only a temporary solution to solving the world’s problems. He thought matching programs were 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.

  “I’d rather make things and do things to change things,” he had said at a Top 100 meeting.

  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 generated goodwill and signaled a shift to a more benevolent regime.

  Within a few months after Cook took over as CEO, employees began noticing other changes. Though still shuttered to the outside eye, the company felt more open internally as the new CEO communicated with them more frequently via emails and Town Hall meetings. Unlike Jobs, who always ate lunch with 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.