With 9 Short Words on His Last Day as Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook Just Taught a Brilliant Leadership Lesson
“This place is proof that culture triumphs over everything.”
EXPERT OPINION BY BILL MURPHY JR., FOUNDER OF UNDERSTANDABLY AND CONTRIBUTING EDITOR, INC. @BILLMURPHYJR
What were you doing in 1998? Tim Cook had just been recruited to work in a senior leadership role at the world’s largest personal-computer company.
Plot twist: The company was not Apple; at the time, the world’s largest personal-computer company was Compaq.
Do readers even remember Compaq? Hewlett-Packard acquired it a few years later. But, for our purposes, what matters is that an executive like Cook could feel very confident he was signing on with a company of the future.
He changed his mind after just six months
But he changed his mind after just six months and left to join Steve Jobs at Apple. In a 2010 speech at his alma mater, Auburn University, he explained his thinking at the time:
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Any purely rational consideration of cost and benefits lined up in Compaq’s favor …
But there are times in our lives when the careful consideration of cost and benefits just doesn’t seem like the right way to make a decision. There are times in all of our lives when a reliance on gut or intuition just seems more appropriate–when a particular course of action just feels right.
And interestingly I’ve discovered it’s in facing life’s most important decisions that intuition seems the most indispensable to getting it right.
It was obviously a pretty good decision. Of course Cook became Jobs’s choice to replace himself when Jobs’s health deteriorated.
In fact, Jobs did such a fantastic job of setting up a succession plan that when his health forced him to step down in 2011, he was able to set it in motion with just a single sentence in a letter to the company’s board:
“I strongly recommend that we execute our succession plan and name Tim Cook as CEO of Apple.”
Source: www.inc.com
