Ten years of Tim: the boring engineer who let Apple rise above itself

When Tim Cook took over at Apple, few had a good eye for it. But in ten years, the somewhat dull engineer propelled the creation of the icon Steve Jobs to the stars and left his own mark. A result-oriented character sketch.

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Few observers believe Cook can replace Steve Jobs as CEO of one of the leading companies in the technology sector. While his executive skills are beyond doubt, he’s not the man of ideas like Steve Jobs is.”

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Sometimes what you read in these columns is visionary. Sometimes we also miss the mark, as the above passage proves. Together with the rest of the world, we had our doubts when the seriously ill Apple driving force, Steve Jobs, appointed his right-hand man, Tim Cook, as his successor in 2011. A dry industrial engineer can never make the creative genius forget Jobs, many commentators argued. Some pessimists even talked about the end of Apple.

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Everyone was wrong. On Tuesday, 60-year-old Cook will be at the helm for exactly ten years and we can say that he made Apple rise above itself. With a valuation of $377 billion in 2011, the tech giant was already no slouch, but under Cook it grew into the most valuable company in the world. At just under $2,500 billion, Apple alone is worth more than the economies of countries like Italy, Canada, Brazil and Russia.

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Cook managed to push Apple to unprecedented heights by not wanting to look too much like Jobs. His predecessor didn’t want that either. At the transfer of power, he said, “I don’t want you ever to wonder how I would have handled it. Just do what’s right.’ And he did. How? By listening carefully to the maniac, the analyst, the diplomat, the activist and the investor friend within himself.

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The mania

Cook has played a significant role at Apple since Jobs snatched him from competitor Compaq in 1998. Jobs had put Apple on the map with spectacular innovations, but it was Cook who turned the chaotic company into a well-oiled machine.

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The engineer turned the production chain upside down by exchanging his own warehouses and factories for external suppliers and production companies. Logistically, he runs Apple like a ‘dairy factory’: if too much stock is left there, it goes bad and costs money. Getting that organized on the scale at which Apple produces electronics is a feat. Apple is still reaping the benefits.

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“The logistics blueprint has enabled Apple’s growth in recent years,” said CEO Paul Deneve, who worked closely with Cook from 2013 to 2017 as head of the special projects division. “Apple is identified with the brilliant design of its products. But getting those products to the consumer on such a large scale is only possible through Tim’s work.’

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With his eye for detail, Tim ensures that out of the many good ideas, only the best remains.

Paul Deneve

Former Apple Special Projects Chief

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In the post-Jobs era, the efficiency obsession has only grown. Cook is maniacally preoccupied with every tiniest detail in the supply chain. The CEO reportedly gets up at 4 a.m. every day to get to the bottom of his business. Every week he meets with his operational team for so long that employees jokingly talk about ‘date night with Tim’. An example of the eye for detail? According to the Bloomberg news agency, Apple employs someone whose job is to negotiate the cost of glue with suppliers.

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Negotiations like this have only gotten better in recent years. Because Apple often needs specific production processes and components with its distinctive products, the mainly Chinese suppliers have organized themselves according to the needs of the American technology group. This way they bring in a lot of business, but they have also made themselves very dependent on Apple. From that position of power, Cook does not shy away from tightening the thumbscrews to get the most out of financially.

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The Analyst

Jobs liked to mess things up, and he made it his life’s work with Apple. With his innovative products, he turned entire industries upside down. Whether it was the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone or the iPad, they were all devices that revolutionized their own territory.

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The fact that Cook does not have that same ‘magic touch’ was the main reason for the gloom at the changing of the guard. But the past ten years have shown that this need not be a disaster. “Tim may not be able to design a product like Steve could, but he understands the world in a way I’ve seen very few CEOs in my 60-year career,” American super investor Warren Buffett once said. He holds a $120 billion position in Apple through his investment vehicle Berkshire Hathaway.

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With his analytical skills, Cook sees opportunities where Jobs did not.

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Deneve has also not seen it as a defect that Cook is not a pure ‘product guy’. ‘You don’t have to be in the design studio every day, like Steve Jobs, to make design important. Tim is a very good listener. He absorbs information and asks the right questions, with which the design team gets back to work. That process repeats itself again and again until something is on the table that is so good that you can sell millions of it.’

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“At Apple, there’s a saying, ‘There are a thousand no’s for every yes,'” says Deneve. “Tim embodies that. With his eye for detail, he ensures that out of the many good ideas at Apple, only the best remains. Everyone uses the word focus, but it wasn’t until Apple that I learned the true meaning of that word.”

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With his analytical skills, Cook also sees opportunities that Jobs did not see. More than his predecessor, who mainly wanted to sell new hardware, Cook believes in the potential of the millions of loyal users of all these revolutionary products. Gradually, he leveraged the innovations of his predecessor by building an ecosystem of products and services around the goldcrests. Digital payments, streaming music or video, third-party apps or ancillary products like a smart watch or the wildly popular wireless earphones AirPods are now ringing the cash register more every quarter in Cupertino, California. In the first nine months of its current fiscal year, Apple has already generated more than $50 billion in revenue from its services business, which in itself would make for a massive tech company.

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That ecosystem also reflects on the sale of the now classic products. As long as you like everything in and around the iPhone, consumers are inclined to load the next generation in their basket when it’s time for a new phone. In this way – and by conquering the Chinese market – Apple managed to grow its turnover year after year without having to deal with major new product launches. When Cook took the helm in 2011, sales were still $65 billion. At the end of 2020, it was 274 billion.

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The diplomat

Key to Apple’s success is the calm Cook brought to a sometimes challenging climate. While Jobs was known for being a bitch who liked to clash with competitors, critics and own collaborators, Cook proved himself to be a fine diplomat.

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That became especially clear during the four years that Donald Trump was in the White House. Its tough stance on China and the ensuing trade war with tariffs on Chinese-made products were basically headache material for Apple, which is heavily dependent on Chinese manufacturing. But Cook managed to steer Apple through that nasty situation wonderfully.

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Although Cook spoke publicly for Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election, he later maneuvered his way into the president’s inner circle via Trump’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner. Trump called Cook “a friend.” That he sometimes talked about ‘Tim Apple’ at a press conference, Cook accepted with a smile.

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Cook willingly allowed himself to be used as a PR tool. During his re-election campaign in 2019, Trump convened the press at an Apple factory in Austin, Texas. The very expensive Macbook Pro is made in that rare American production facility of Apple. Trump presented the factory as an example of how his policies were able to lure production back to the US. That the factory had been operational since the Obama era went unmentioned. Cook passed it with a smile.

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While Apple veterans were uncomfortable with Trump’s rubbing against the Apple brand, the benefits were tangible. Apple obtained a string of exceptions to Trump’s input rates.

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The activist

Cook gets away with political scheming, because at the same time he dares to speak out about social themes. Unlike Jobs, who was only involved with Apple, he wants to put his weight in the social field as captain of industry. He spoke out against Trump’s migration policy and addressed issues such as discrimination and privacy. He even went to battle with the FBI, when they demanded access to a suspect’s iPhone. He won.

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That Cook strives for public impact became especially clear in 2014. In an op-ed in The Washington Post, he came out as gay, to emphasize that orientation should not be a brake in life. As a pragmatist, he studied beforehand whether his outing would have any impact on the sales figures.

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Cook sees his social commitment as an important factor in making his staff proud to work for Apple. But it sometimes clashes with the image of a mega-corporation squeezing its suppliers for profit.

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When Cook attended the US Golden Globes TV awards ceremony in January last year, following the launch of the streaming service AppleTV+, he got a kick out of it. “The Apple series ‘The Morning Show’ is a superb drama about the importance of doing good in the world, made by a sweatshop company in China,” host Ricky Gervais sneered. Cook smiled politely, but noted afterwards how much effort Apple is making to improve working conditions at its suppliers.

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The investor friend

Much more than Jobs, Cook is attentive to the demands and needs of shareholders. Their pleas to pay out the heaping and low-yielding mountain of cash went unanswered under Jobs for years. The Apple founder had been traumatized by the period in the 1990s when Apple was teetering on the brink of financial abyss. “Since then, Jobs has treated money the way a famine survivor treats the pantry: as something that could disappear at any moment,” Fortune once wrote.

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For Cook, dividends and share buybacks to reward shareholders are not taboo. In 2012, he paid a dividend for the first time since 1995. Meanwhile, Apple returned nearly $400 billion to shareholders, which made Apple even more of a Wall Street darling. The fact that American super investor Warren Buffett owns about 5 percent of Apple today is due to the compensation policy.

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