An entrepreneur managed to found his own company and grow it quickly thanks to a key lesson he took from Tim Cook
Many thought that no one would be able to fill Steve Jobs’s shoes at Apple. However, it has become the most valuable company in the world by being led by its current CEO Tim Cook. Under his command, he was able to expand the global reach of his products and develop services to make them more attractive.
However, while Jobs liked to give business advice to others, the successful Cook is much more reserved in this regard. However, now a key lesson has come to light that can be useful both for entrepreneurs who are starting their way and for other areas of human activity.
Cook’s lesson, revealed by a former employee
Soroush Salehian He worked in Apple’s special projects group for four years before co-founding the startup Aeva in 2017. Watching Cook reinforced a lesson Salehian learned from other executives he has worked for throughout his career: the importance of a obsessive focus on quality of their products.
Developing an innovative, high-quality product that adds value to customers is a challenge, says Salehian. Doing it consistently requires an understanding of what you want and an intense focus on getting those results.
“I think that’s what really separates the good from the exceptional.Salehian says.
To bring that approach to Aeva, they started by making sure the company wasn’t overwhelmed by projects. For Salehian and the other co-founder, Mina Rezk (also a former Apple employee), it was especially important to identify the company’s strengths and build it around them.
The main idea of Aeva is to improve the perception capabilities of vehicles and consumer electronics through LIDAR sensors, which bounce light rays off nearby objects to measure their distance. The company has taken a different approach than its competitors, which Salehian says has allowed the sensor to absorb more information and use less energy at the same time.
Apple’s secret: “obsessive focus on quality.”
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Tim Cook: his mark on Apple’s success
Orderly and successful with the numbers, but also with good management that puts the customer at the center, Cook’s Apple was able to stand on the foundations built by Jobs, but led her to be much more empathetic, charitable and open.
Unlike what Jobs did when he returned in 1997, Cook had no intention of tearing down what was not working and then rebuilding it. Rather, it was prudent to gain the confidence of investors and followers of the brand, avoiding big changes.
First he got involved in administrative matters (which Jobs had no patience for) and then he added an active strategy in terms of promotions and reporting structures, in addition to having implanted a strong charitable side to the firm.
The message from the beginning was one of camaraderie: “I trust that our best years are yet to come and that together we continue to make Apple that magical place that it is today,” he told his employees after his appointment.
Likewise, Cook kept a line of communication open to everyone, like Jobs, through various email addresses, personally answering all messages.
The executive showed that what is important in a mature company is not so much the product as the logistics: the efficient supply chain, distribution, finance and marketing. Jobs despite his position, in practice always served as a product manager obsessed with his creations, while Cook maintained a generalist executive vision that was the key to his success.
Tim Cook, the “ideal general” who guides Apple’s growth.
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Experts define him as an ideal general for peacetime, since his success was in having been able to take advantage of the reputation of the brand, to consolidate the profitability of the business, giving stability and predictability to the company.
Thanks to him and his obsession with ordering the structure, the firm continued to advance in its mature moment. He thus achieved milestones such as enhancing services to monetize devices that run on iOS, or even challenging the designs themselves, when he demonstrated that nothing was sacred by eliminating the home button from phones or developing cell phones with large screens (for Jobs, smartphones should fit in the palm of the hand).
Today, the CEO, whose fortune exceeds US $ 1,500 million, has strong support from his employees, despite external doubts about the firm’s ability to continue innovating as in the past, the result of a legacy full of milestones: Apple II, Macintosh, iMac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone and iPad, just to name the most disruptive from an endless list of hits.
Is that the word “innovation” is a sacred mantra within the company founded in a garage in the city of Palo Alto in the mid-70s. Its corridors even display banners with questions such as “have you innovated today?” so that the premise sticks like cement to each of its workers. Tim Cook responded to this by valuing creativity at all levels. Hits like the Apple Watch, Apple AirPods, and the recently launched Apple + prove it.
“The most important discovery so far in my life was the result of a single decision: to join Apple,” the CEO was able to say, who was not afraid to jump into some hard-to-fill shoes. For now, he wears them with pride and allows him to walk with proven success.
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