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December 07, 2012
11 nuggets of wisdom from Apple CEO Tim Cook
Tim Cook has been in the Apple CEO job for 16 months and Businessweek sat down with him for a extensive interview. The article is quite long but worth the read. Here's my Cliff Notes version of the wisdom he imparted:
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- "In creating these great products we focus on enriching people’s lives—a higher cause for the product."
- "You know, we want to really enrich people’s lives at the end of the day, not just make money. Making money might be a byproduct, but it’s not our North Star."
- "That’s a part of our base principle, that we will only do a few things. And we’ll only do things where we can make a significant contribution. I don’t mean financially. I mean some significant contribution to the society at large."
- "Creativity is not a process...It’s people who care enough to keep thinking about something until they find the simplest way to do it."
- "Creativity and innovation are something you can’t flowchart out...A lot of companies have innovation departments, and this is always a sign that something is wrong when you have a VP of innovation or something. You know, put a for-sale sign on the door."
- "Everybody in our company is responsible to be innovative, whether they’re doing operational work or product work or customer service work."
- "The most important things in life, whether they’re personal or professional, are decided on intuition."
- "I despise politics. There is no room for it in a company. ...No bureaucracy. We want this fast-moving, agile company where there are no politics, no agendas."
- "We want ideas coming from all of our 80,000 people, not five or three. A much smaller number of people have to decide and edit and move forward, but you want ideas coming from everywhere. You want people to explore."
- "So I’ll walk around our stores. You can learn a tremendous amount in a store. I get a lot of e-mails and so forth, but it’s a different dimension when you’re in a store and talking to customers face to face."
- "Not allowing yourself to become insular is very important—maybe the most important thing, I think, as a CEO."
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Thanks Jackie. I have been addicted to cliff notes since college:-) Some great nuggests of wesidom from Tim. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for the feedback Rick!
