Tim Cook says he loves THIS trick of Steve Jobs as Apple CEO

Speaking to GQ, Cook said “I knew I couldn’t be Steve [when I became CEO].” 

“I don’t think anybody could be Steve. I think he was a once-in-a-hundred-years kind of individual, an original by any stretch of the imagination. And so what I had to do was to be the best version of myself,” he added.

In the interview, Tim Cook also admitted that he took a leadership trick or two from Steve Jobs that he loves. 

“One of the things I loved about him was he didn’t expect innovation out of just one group in the company or creativity out of one group,” Cook said. “He expected it everywhere in the company.”

Before taking the role of CEO in 2011, Tim Cook was Apple’s chief operating officer, overseeing worldwide operations and sales.

“When we were running operations, we tried to be innovative in operations and creative in operations, just like we were creative elsewhere,” Cook said. “We fundamentally had to be in order to build the products that we were designing.”

Under Cook leadership, Apple has grown to become a multi trillion-dollar company today. He oversaw the launch of Airpods, Apple Watch and the M1 processor. Apple also expanded its service-based offerings under Cook leadership.

Cook admitted to GQ that he still uses some of Jobs’ old traditions, like 9 a.m. meetings every Monday. Speaking at Vox Media’s 2022 Code Conference in Los Angeles, Tim Cook said “He was the best teacher I ever had, by far. Those teachings live on, not just in me, in a whole bunch of people who are [at Apple].”

“We don’t really look back very much at all in history. We’re always focused on the future and trying to feel like that we’re very much sort of at that starting line where you can really dream and have big ideas that are not constrained by the past in some kind of way,” Cook said.