Hey guys, it’s Greg with Apple Explained, and today we’re going to explore the history
of Tim Cook.
Where he grew up, some of his career achievements, and how he ended up as CEO of the most valuable
company in the world.
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So as you may know, Tim Cook is the current CEO of Apple who replaced Steve Jobs in 2011.
And while Cook may not be as famous, he’s just as interesting and has contributed just
as much to the company over his tenure.
We’ll start off by covering his early life, then explain his career path, and finally
we’ll discuss his major achievements within Apple.
So, Timothy Donald Cook was born on November 1st, 1960 in Mobile, Alabama.
Now Mobile isn’t a big place, and it’s not exactly known for producing the most famous
people in the world – although there have been a few big names, including Jeff Sessions,
Laverne Cox, and quite a few major league baseball and NFL football players.
Cook, though, wasn’t really set up for fame in his early life.
His mother worked in a pharmacy, his dad worked in a shipyard, and he had two brothers that
his parents also supported.
He was always known as a bright student, though, and he graduated high school second in his
class.
He eventually left Mobile in 1982 for Auburn University in Alabama where he earned a bachelor’s
degree in industrial engineering.
At this point, Cook’s story starts to take shape.
After Auburn, he started working for IBM.
He spent twelve years there, from 1982 to 1994, and climbed the ranks to director of
North American fulfillment.
During this time, he also earned his master’s degree from Duke University in business administration.
He was awarded a title as a Fuqua Scholar, given to the top ten percent of business administration
graduates at Duke.
After leaving IBM, he briefly jumped around to a few more high-level positions with companies
like Compaq and Intelligent Electronics.
In 1998, Cook met Steve Jobs who offered Cook a position at Apple, but it wasn’t same
Apple we know of today.
At that time, Apple was losing money fast and nearing bankruptcy.
Many in the tech industry felt Apple was doomed to failure with no chance of recovery.
Including Steve Jobs, but that didn’t prevent Jobs from trying to save the company anyway.
Because Apple was essentially a sinking ship, many people tried to dissuade Cook from taking
the job, but he felt that it was the right choice.
He described in as an intuitive decision, and during a commencement speech at Auburn
University, he said that “on that day in early 1998 I listened to my intuition, not
the left side of my brain or for that matter even the people who knew me best…
no more than five minutes into my initial interview with Steve, I wanted to throw caution
and logic to the wind and join Apple.”
He described Jobs as a creative genius and felt that he could make a huge impact at Apple
– one that would turn the company from a sinking ship into a successful tech giant.
And as we now know, that was the right decision.
Cook did end up making some crucial contributions that brought Apple into the global limelight
and really allowed Jobs’s creative genius to shine through.
At the start, Cook took a position as the Senior Vice President for worldwide operations.
He was in charge of supplier relationships, supply chain operations, and leading the Macintosh
division.
One of the first actions he took was shutting down Macintosh factories and signing new contracts
with manufacturers to take some of the pressure off the internal supply chain.
He reduced inventory significantly by successfully implementing something called just-in-time
manufacturing.
An inventory strategy borrowed from Toyota that reduced flow times within production
systems as well as response times from suppliers.
He negotiated new deals with suppliers and within a year of his hiring, Apple began to
see profits for the first time in years.
Cook served as Apple’s Senior Vice President until 2007, and in that time he made a lot
of important decisions that seriously affected the future of the company.
He predicted that flash memory would be central to new technology in 2005, and his decision
to invest in it early payed off big with products like iPods, iPads, and iPhones.
He helped create the current image of the company which allowed higher market prices
for products – all while keeping production costs low.
He was promoted to lead operations in 2007, and then as interim Chief Executive in 2009.
As Steve Jobs battled with pancreatic cancer, Cook took over more and more of the daily
operations of Apple – and Jobs eventually appointed Cook Chief Executive Officer on
August 24th, 2011 – just a few weeks before Jobs passed away.
At that point, Cook had a lot of pressure and responsibility on his shoulders since
Steve Jobs was obviously a tough act to follow.
But Cook delivered a successful first year as CEO and earned the title of TIME magazine’s
100 Most Influential People, but he was only getting started.
In the third fiscal quarter of 2012, Apple’s revenue didn’t look as good as expected,
and infighting among executives was reaching a boiling point.
In response, Cook rearranged the leadership team of Apple pretty significantly.
First, Scott Forstall stepped down as the senior vice president of iOS in 2012 and then
left the company for good a year later in 2013.
Cook and the board of directors asked the vice president of retail John Browett to step
down only a few months after he started, and his role was divvied up to other high-ranking
individuals.
This rearrangement was controversial for both Apple employees and outsiders, who thought
that most of Apple’s success came from allowing tension to exist between senior executives.
And this wouldn’t be the last controversial event involving Tim Cook.
In 2014, he made some waves by issuing what some people thought was a more than sharp
remark to shareholders.
As part of an ongoing commitment to making Apple a more sustainable company, he announced
that Apple was increasing its investment in renewable energy sources and in making sure
that their raw materials were obtained ethically.
But some shareholders, like the National Center for Public Policy Research, weren’t happy
with these endeavors.
They asked Cook to only pursue investments that were immediately profitable to Apple.
And Cook responded with anger, saying, “When we work on making our devices accessible by
the blind, I don’t consider the bloody return on investment.
If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock.”
Now, obviously Cook has been much more politically outspoken than Jobs, but this event was one
of many that emphasized his concern with business ethics and the impact of Apple on the world
– not only as a supplier of technology, but as a manufacturer and distributer.
Another example of this ethical concern happened in 2016, a few months after the San Bernardino
shooting.
The FBI asked Apple to cooperate in the investigation of Rizwan Farook, one of the shooting suspects,
by unlocking his iPhone and allowing investigators to search its contents.
When Cook denied the request, a federal judge ordered Apply to comply by creating special
firmware to get around the phone’s security.
Cook appealed the decision – not only in the court of law, but in the court of public
opinion with a scathing open letter that condemned the governments’ actions.
He called the consequences of their demands “chilling” and predicted that, if Apple
was forced to comply, there was no telling what the future of privacy laws might hold.
A day before the appeal on March 22nd, 2016, the FBI found a third party to unlock the
phone and dropped the case against Apple.
Not all of the controversies surrounding Cook paint him in a good light, however.
In 2017, documents leaked that showed Apple paying extremely low taxes to the Irish government
before transferring their offshore accounts to the Channel Islands.
These “Paradise Papers”, as they were called, resulted in Apple being asked to pay
almost $15 billion in unpaid taxes to the European Union.
On top of potential tax evasion, Cook was criticized personally for his business expenses,
which amounted to almost $100,000 in personal travel and $224,000 for personal security
in 2017.
Cook defended himself and Apple against both of these criticisms, claiming that Apple paid
taxes responsibly and that his personal bills were so high only to preserve his safety.
While Tim Cook is known for making some pretty tough, and very public, decisions, he has
been criticized by analysts for the amount of innovation that Apple has produced since
his time serving as CEO.
He was criticized for the iPhone X, which saw slow sales after its release in November
2017 – but he defended it fiercely as a prime example of Apple innovation.
Even though he may not have the same creative genius Jobs was known for, he’s still an
excellent businessman with a history of major upgrades to the company product line.
For instance, in 2014 he announced that Apple was acquiring Beats Music and that its founders,
Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine, were taking executive roles at Apple.
In that same year he announced features like Apple Pay, Burst Selfies, the Apple Watch,
and reliable Apple News.
So, we’ve discussed Cook’s career at Apple and some of the important decisions he’s
made as both Senior Vice President and most recently as CEO.
But there’s a lot more to him than just being a leader at Apple.
His decisions for the future of the company are often based in global ethical concerns,
like hiring Lisa Jackson, the former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, to
help improve the company’s reliance on renewable resources and an increased effort in creating
accessibility features for people with disabilities.
Those decisions come from a lifelong interest in justice and his own personal values.
When he was about 13 years old, growing up in Alabama, he witnessed members of the Ku
Klux Klan burning a cross on a Black family’s lawn.
He cites this incident as a major influence on his life and considers himself a human
rights activist.
He was also wrongly diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in 1996 – a progressive, degenerative
illness – which he says made him “see the world in a different way” and motivated
him to help others even more.
This system of ethics and beliefs manifest themselves in different ways with Cook.
One example is in 2017, when President Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris
Accords, Cook publicly voiced his disappointment and spoke directly with the president about
his concerns.
But climate change and renewable energy aren’t the only issues that Cook stands up for.
In 2012, he donated $50 million dollars to hospitals around Silicon Valley to help build
infrastructure and a new children’s hospital in the area.
He donates almost annually to democratic politicians, including Barack Obama’s first presidential
campaign and Hillary Clinton’s campaign in the 2016 election.
He also spoke out strongly in 2017 on the discontinuation of DACA, the Deferred Action
for Childhood Arrivals program, defending the children of undocumented immigrants’
right to stay, work, and get education in the United States.
Finally, and maybe most significantly, Cook is passionate about lesbian, gay, bisexual,
and transgender rights.
He came out publicly as gay in 2014, although he had been open about his sexuality in his
private life years earlier.
He now speaks publicly as a gay advocate and was inducted into the Alabama Academy of Honor,
where he spoke about the history of LGBT activism in the south.
He says that he plans to donate his fortune when he passes away to charity.
Overall, Cook has spent twenty years with Apple and been through both some good and
some bad.
He’s credited with helping turn the company around in the 90’s, and has since built
Apple into an extremely profitable company that brought in almost $50 billion in 2017.
In 2018, he pledged to create 20,000 new jobs and invest $350 billion into the American
economy.
And as a result of his ethical beliefs and advocacy, Cook holds the honor of Financial
Times Person of the Year, the Robert F. Kennedy Ripple of Hope Award, Fortune Magazine’s
World’s Greatest Leader, an honorary doctorate from George Washington University, and the
Human Rights Campaign Visibility Award.
Who knows how long he’ll serve as Apple’s CEO, but one thing is certain.
Steve Jobs left his company in very good hands.
So that is the history of Tim Cook, and if you want to vote for the next video topic,
don’t forget to subscribe.
Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you next time.