It's the fall of 2014 in Tim Cook's office at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California. Tim sits at his desk hard at work when there's a knock at the door. He looks up to see Josh Taryngell, the 42-year-old editor of Bloomberg Business Week magazine, standing in the doorway. Tim rises from his desk to greet him.
Hey, Josh. Tim, how are you? I'm well. Thanks for coming all this way. Of course. You going to tell me what this is all about? Well, have a seat. Since becoming Apple's CEO, Tim has done two extended interviews with Josh. Tim likes and trusts him, and that's why he asked Josh to fly in from New York for this private meeting. Tim is about to make a huge announcement about a personal matter, and he needs Josh's help. Yeah, okay. This is all a little mysterious, isn't it, Tim? I know. I know. And I will explain.
Deep in thought, Tim rocks back and forth in his chair for a moment, and then begins. There is something that's been…knowing at me for a while. I was hoping you can help me with it. I'll try, I guess that depends on what it is.
Well, Tim continues rocking back and forth some more until his eyes land on a framed photograph of Martin Luther King on the wall. Seeing it, Tim stops rocking. That photo over there of Dr. King, I walk past it every day. Most of the time I find it to be an inspiration, but recently I feel it's been more of a challenge. How so, Tim? There's a quotation of Dr. King's that I've always liked. Life's most persistent and urgent question is what are you doing for others? I've been thinking about that a lot.
Tim stops for a moment, and stares at the floor, suddenly nervous again. Seeing this, Josh asks, delicately. Tim, are you all right? Is there something wrong? No, I'm a private person, Josh, as you know. But I recognize that, as Apple CEO, I'm a public figure as well, and there are responsibilities I believe come with that position. The time has come for me to step forward and tell the world that I'm gay.
Okay? Josh is surprised. This is not what he was expecting from the meeting. A lot of my colleagues here at Apple already know I'm lucky to work in a business and for a company that's so supportive. But that's not the case for everywhere. I've reached a point where I think it'd be selfish of me to keep this to my small circle. If talking about this publicly could help push the conversation, create more acceptance outside of Apple. Then it's my duty to speak up.
But Tim, I think that's great. What can I do to help? I've been talking with Anderson Cooper. I had lunch with him actually when I was in New York. CNN anchor Anderson Cooper publicly came out in 2012 in a letter in which he spoke of his pride and happiness as a gay man. I really liked how he did it, how he wrote that letter. It was classy, you know, understated. I found it inspiring. He was proud of who he was and so my.
But Tim opens his desk drawer, pulls out a folder and removes a piece of paper. So I've written something, a short assay of sorts, a wondered whether your magazine would like to run it. He slides the paper over to Josh. Would you like me to read it now? Oh, yeah, please. And if you have any thoughts as a writer, I'd love to hear them, you know.
Tim watches silently as Josh reads the essay. When he's finished, the journalist hands the paper back. Yeah, we'll hold a page for you. I think it's all right. I think you put it beautifully, Tim. I'd hardly change a word. Well, I don't want it to be on the cover. I don't want it heavily trailed in the newspapers, anything like that. No, I understand. I just want people to see that it's me, that this is who I am, and I couldn't be prouder.
When Tim Cook's assay was published in late October 2014, he became the most high profile business leader ever to come out as gay. Tim's thoughtful words, one wise red praise. As one commentator put it, if you're a 14-year-old kid, you find the CEO of one of the most iconic companies in the world happens to be gay. You think there's no limit on what I can do. After Steve Jobs passed, as Tim continued to reshape Apple in his own image, he would learn that in both his private and professional life, the best way to lead was to be true to himself.
In a four-part series, The Generation Y Podcast unravels the story of Khalif Browder, a young boy falsely accused of stealing a backpack and held it Rikers Island for three years without trial. This is a story about a young life caught in the middle of the justice system. Listen to Generation Y on Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.
From Wondery, I'm Lindsay Graham, and this is Business Members.
我是林赛·格雷厄姆(Lindsay Graham),来自Wondery的节目《商业会员》。
There is no denying the impact Tim Cook had on Apple. As Chief Operating Officer under Steve Jobs, Tim developed a reputation for pushing profitability by crafting complex but efficient global supply chains. After Steve's death, as CEO, Tim helped usher in a new era of services at Apple, company once known almost exclusively for its innovation in products. And though Tim's critics often point out that he is no Steve Jobs, there is no doubt that Tim's unique brand of leadership maintains stability at Apple. During his tenure, Apple may have had fewer product breakthroughs, but profits quadruple as Apple rose to become a trillion dollar company.
Here to talk about Tim Cook's successes and failures and what the future has in store for Apple is New York Times Technology Reporter and author TripMichael. Here's our conversation.
TripMichael, welcome to Business Movers. Thanks so much for having me. Your book is titled After Steve, How Apple Became a Trillion Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul. Apple is a still revered company and this is a fairly provocative title. What made you want to write this book with that title?
Just by way of personal background, I arrived in San Francisco by way of their Atlanta where I was covering alcohol and tobacco in late 2016 to cover Apple for the Wall Street Journal. And one of the first meetings that I had or an early meeting that I had was a coffee with a local journalist named John Markoff, who's covered technology for a long time. Then as we talked about Apple and where I should focus my time and attention suggested that I spend some time investigating Johnny Hive and learning about a place called the Battery, which is a private club here in San Francisco. He didn't offer up much more than that, but it was just friptic enough to give me a breadcrum and something to explore.
And as I asked people about those two topics, I came to learn that Johnny Hive had distance himself from the company, which I thought was unusual and it made me wonder why did that happen. And that was really the driving question that led me to embark on this book project.
Well, you know, became clear as I asked people about Johnny that after the release of the Apple Watch, he really stepped back from his day to day responsibility, said the company. It was unclear why that was the case, but the more people I talked to, the more I came to understand that it had to do with the way the company had changed as it became bigger, both in terms of the number of customers that it was serving and in terms of the number of workers that it had. And in the course of that to keep up with those demands, the way it had changed, it had become more operational. And that was a direct reflection of the leadership of Tim Cook, who came from the operational side of the company.
When you think about Apple, there's a polarity to the company. There's always been a kind of strong operational backbone. But then the head of the company was this kind of creative force and creative ingenuity that drove it forward. Johnny really represented the creative force after Steve Jobs' death. And Tim was the operational backbone during Steve Jobs' tenure and then after Steve Jobs' death. I think many people would recognize this polarity in almost any growing company. The needs of a bigger company or a broader company are different than the small startup it that once was, not that really Apple at this point before Steve's departure was a startup anymore. So we have these two figures that kind of represent this polarity, this duality, and you focused on Johnny, I have a little bit here, but did you speak to Johnny or Tim Cook in the production of your book?
The first thing you have to know about Apple is it's kind of like Fight Club. You don't talk about Fight Club, you don't talk about Apple if you work there. The company has a strict code of secrecy and they instruct their employees even to not talk with their own spouses about the work they do during the day. And some spouses who both work at the company go so far as to not talk to each other about the work that they do in separate divisions. That's how severe and observant they are of this fortress of secrecy concept that they cultivate.
So Johnny and Tim were unwilling to talk to me, not surprisingly, because that's the ethos of the company, that's the code that they all abide by. All I could do was ask them repeatedly and advise them about where my reporting was taking me and what direction the book was going in and ask them repeatedly to talk to me. At the end, ultimately, neither chose to do so for the book on the record and so I was left with the process of fact checking the material that I've gathered with their representatives.
This duality, I suppose, is also embedded in the title of your book. How Apple became a trillion dollar company, that sounds good. How it lost its soul, that sounds bad. What was the reaction to that title from the many Apple fans? Did you have any feedback?
Yeah, I mean, there was an impulse among a number of Apple enthusiasts to judge this book by the cover and to marinate on the final half of that subtitle, the lost its soul part and read past the first half of that, which is how it became a trillion dollar company. They really, at this point, are multi-chloric in dollar company. That is really what the title was supposed to be. It was supposed to be both aspects of that, it was supposed to reflect both the accomplishments and achievements of Tim Cook and the first half of it and the departure of Johnny Ive and the second half.
Johnny was really the ultimate manifestation of the company's creative spirit and its soul form. When he reached a point where he didn't feel like he could operate inside this operational company, he decided to leave. That's the lost its soul part. The company is still a multi-trillion dollar enterprise and Tim Cook is continuing to lead it forward. It's just taken on a new and different shape. And for readers who did crack the book and dove into it, they could see that Johnny play out in the stories of these two individuals and why they made the respective decisions they did.
Well, let's explore the journeys of these two men. Both played a pivotal role in Apple's success under Steve. And both when he died, felt a great lack in their lives and in their careers. How do you think Steve's death impacted Johnny and Tim in particular individually?
It was crushing. It was crushing for both of them. It was crushing for so many people at Apple. Steve was the inspiration for many of them and why they went to work and why they were willing to work so hard. He helped people do what they didn't believe was possible and he developed products that really changed the world. There's no better reason to get up in the morning and go log long hours than knowing that you're going to have that big of an impact on the world around you.
And so when Steve died, the company had really been built around him. He was the head of the company, the body operated at his direction. And that was a huge loss. It had to find a new way to operate. It was disorienting for both Tim and Johnny and they handled it in different ways. I mean, you could see the sadness of Tim in so much as he closed Steve Jobs office, left it exactly as it was with his daughter's drawings on the whiteboard in the office as paper still strewn about. And Tim said that on occasion, his office was nearby. He would open Steve Jobs office step inside and just ponder who Steve was and what Steve meant, almost like anyone visiting a gravesite would. Johnny, on the other hand, really went into what his friends considered to be a relatively deep depression.
He seemed to be in a funk that it was impossible to get him out of. He would spend many of his days inside the design studio where he worked, seated at a table talking with a colleague and what other onlookers thought looked like in the sessions of grief therapy. It wasn't until the company decided and Johnny pushed the idea of developing a watch that he seemed to come back out of that depression and find kind of a motivation and a drive to really honor Steve Jobs by developing a new product that we carry on apples legacy of making devices that change the world.
Breast Beach is essential to a functioning democracy. Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle? What should be done? Is a new platform needed? Is Twitter dying? I'm David Brown, host of the new Wondery podcast, Flipping the Bird, Elon vs. Twitter. Join us as we unravel the fascinating story of Elon Musk's unexpected bid to buy Twitter and all of the drama that has happened since then.
Breast Beach 是一个运转良好的民主社会所必要的。您认为 Twitter 严格遵守这个原则吗?应该采取什么措施?需要一个新平台吗?Twitter 正在死亡吗?我是 David Brown,新Wondery播客《Flipping the Bird, Elon vs. Twitter》的主持人。加入我们,一起揭开 Elon Musk 意外收购 Twitter 的迷人故事,以及此后发生的所有戏剧。
Those still employed at Twitter soon saw the company and its culture morphed into something they didn't recognize. He laid off 75% of the Twitter workhorse, reinstated exceedingly problematic and dangerous users, and even encouraged his staff to sleep in the office. Ex employees, Elon's critics and fellow CEOs were quick to denounce him as an inover his head rich guy. His Elon all talker are his unruly methods. Actually, the work of a genius. Follow Flipping the Bird, Elon vs. Twitter, on Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcast. You can listen early and add free by subscribing to Wondery Plus and Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app.
I can imagine that this is, and I'll take your biological metaphor a little further, that if Apple was a body commanded by the mind of Steve, and he was himself an iconic duality, a creative genius and an erasible figure too, and then all of a sudden he is gone and replaced by two individual men who embody maybe perhaps half of Steve. In this way, Apple has been lobotomized. How do you think the company was able to survive this nearsurgical procedure and rise to a level of success at least in the first couple of years of increasing sales and a remarkable new product?
With your permission, I'm going to shift the metaphor ever so slightly to one that I think everyone will relate to and one that a lot of readers have brought up with me after reading the book. That is the idea that Tim Cook was really the left brain of the company, far more analytical, mathematical, and his decision making, and Johnny was the right brain creatively minded individual at the company. They were the uber representations of these two aspects of Apple, and jobs when he was live was the balancing force for those two things.
When jobs died, what you had was this internal struggle between those two impulses inside of Apple. Ultimately, because Tim Cook rose to the top of the company, that left brain spirit and that left brain direction began to inform what the company was doing more so than the right brain had. That was really what it led the company more in the past under Steve, because that was where his impulse also lied. But it is no doubt that Apple has grown as a company enormously. Perhaps the operational aspects of Apple and Tim's predilections towards that direction are the more successful in terms of the average company's benchmarks.
Why do you think then that it is important that we also mention that Apple lost its soul? I guess I'm asking why is there a duality to discuss it all? You can judge Apple on a couple of different metrics, and people have done so over the years. One scoreboard would obviously be the one that will all straight, watches, and follows, and that's how is the company performing in terms of sales and revenue and cost management, profitability, and so on and so forth. By that metric, the company has been a remarkable runway success. During Tim Cook's tenure, it has increased its market value sevenfold from around $350 billion to $2.4 trillion. That's remarkable.
But inside the company, for those who work there, the reason that they went to work was that promise of being able to make products that changed the world. When you look at their suite of products over the past decade, they've introduced arguably one new product category, and that is the watch. Whereas in the prior decade, they were able to really revolutionize music with the iPod, revolutionize the phone experience with the iPhone, and really change the way people do computing by introducing a popular tablet in the iPod. Those three products just have not been able to have the same success in introducing new products over this past decade as they did in the previous one under Jobs.
It sounds like to me that we're identifying three categories of challenge that Apple faced in the loss of its co-founder. One is just remaining the innovative company it was so that it can continue to innovate in the future and guarantee future success in profits. That is always going to be hard. Innovation is not free, and it's not easy, and the more you do it, the less opportunity there is for it in the future. But what I'm interested in though is that the loss of the culture of innovation, perhaps, is more important to the inner workings and employees' commitment to the company. That might be a self-fulfilling prophecy. If employees at Apple feel that the company cannot innovate, that they will make sure they won't.
You're right, and I think that's one of the hard things about scrutinizing Apple in this era and this decade, because you literally cannot say the company has done poorly under Tim Cook. That'd be impossible. There's no doubt that Tim Cook has pulled off arguably the most successful, succession story of any CEO in modern times, if not ever. It is not easy to follow in the footstabs of somebody who has been as influential in the world and as revered as somebody like Steve Jobs. That's a huge shadow to step into, and Tim did it in large part by being himself in the process.
You're correct. I mean, the way Tim leads is very different from his predecessor. Steve Jobs led by God and in-state and was very deeply involved in product. Tim Cook leads through analysis and seeks out a tremendous amount of data before making a decision. For people accustomed to the way Steve Jobs' predecessors operated, they feel like sometimes the company becomes mired in analysis paralysis and it doesn't move forward decisively and quickly and swiftly. They also feel like the company does not have the singular product direction to bring a vision to what it's putting out into the world and they think that that's impaired it to some degree.
That gets at this squishy cultural idea that you're talking about of the creative spirit of the company. The company's had to learn to operate in a different way where people are making decisions collectively rather than an individual like Steve Jobs making decisions decisively and finally. When you look at the scoreboard ultimately, the company has done a tremendous job of making that adjustment. In the process, people who preferred the other way have decided that maybe it's not the place for them anymore. That's been part of the transition that's occurred over the past decade.
In our series on Tim Cook's succession, we mentioned one of Steve's directives to him to not lead the company thinking what would Steve do, but to be his own man. It seems like you agree that he is leading in a manner that is consistent with who he is. Perhaps that is one portion of why in Tim's personal life, he became the first Fortune 500 CEO to publicly come out as gay. This is a big decision for anyone, let alone a public figure like Tim Cook. Do you know anything about his decision to come out?
Yeah, and I think this is the way Tim approached this is really representative of the thoughtfulness that he's brought to bear in all aspects of what he does at Apple and how calculating and aware he can be of what he does and when. Tim had been rumored to be gay for the read of five years prior to coming out publicly. He'd never acknowledged it, but those rumors in Swirl had been in press reports and on websites such as Galker and so on so forth.
He didn't do it immediately after becoming CEO because it deemed it immaterial to the job he was going to do. Ultimately when 2014 rolled around, Tim Cook recognized that the company was about to have a year of tremendous accomplishment and achievement. It was going to launch the Apple Watch and thereby rebut any critics who thought that they would never be able to launch another new product after Steve Jobs' death. I was going to prove them wrong and it was also going to release a plus size iPhone, a bigger iPhone that would challenge Samsung which had been making larger smartphones for a few years at that point and he thought and knew that that phone would be that there would be a voracious appetite for that phone.
In the marketplace, he was right on both accounts and in the midst of that and the wake of releasing the watch and the wake of this enormous event that carried so much weight for the company where the company introduced that larger smartphone and then did their help standard one more thing in note and introduced the Apple Watch and then finalized everything with a YouTube concert live at a theater for employees where employees literally set back and said, well, what do we do now? It feels like we've reached a pinnacle. Tim Cook decided to go public and in prior to doing so when he talked to his top executives and board members about this decision, he told them that part of the reason he did it then was it would be one thing for him to fail as Steve Jobs successor. It would be far more of a setback if he failed as Steve Jobs successor and the first publicly gay CEO of a Fortune 500 company. And that was why he timed it when he did it.
He timed it at a time when he knew Apple was hitting its stride and going to achieve tremendous success which went on to do right afterwards. And at a time when really the political atmosphere and the receptivity publicly towards being gay and America had changed, there was far more formal welcoming attitude and this was just prior to the Supreme Court decision to make gay marriage possible in the country and everything else. So, all in all, I mean, I think it's a testament to him picking the right moment to make a key and critical decision.
What was the reaction to his announcement inside the company and out? You know, it's funny. I mean, the way Tim handled it was very muted, right? Like this wasn't some grand pronouncement or like big public declaration or anything like that. He secured a page inside business week, wrote a personal assay that was very representative of his thinking on the subject. And that was it. He didn't do a lot of press around it. And inside the company, it was largely shrugs because I think everyone understood and knew that Tim was gay and outside the company, I think there was a sense of relief that Tim had come out and done this so that he could show other executives who are LGBTQ that it was okay to be themselves and talk about who they were when they were ready.
And clearly Tim's done a tremendous job of leading the company since making that announcement. And to his earlier concern about being a failure, the risk of being a failure and the setbacks that that could create for other LGBTQ individuals who are in leadership and business, that became a non-issue because of how well Apple has done in the years since.
Well let's talk about how well Apple has done in the years since and with Tim Cook at the helm. Apple has changed as it must, as it grows and as the times change. How has Tim steered the company into a changing horizon? You know, he's provided a steadiness to the company. I mean, he's been able to steer what's become an aircraft carrier forward, which is no small feat.
In doing that, he's had to wrestle with the law of large numbers, which is this reality and theory and business that when your sales get so large, you have to find enormous growth for it to make a small difference to your top line. And so one of the things Tim did relatively early was say, you know, if we're going to go into a product, if we're going to develop a product, it needs to have the potential to be a $10 billion business. And this foreclosed a lot of opportunities for Apple. You know, there was no reason to launch some gadget that may generate, you know, a billion dollars in sales, they really needed to focus on something that had a tremendous potential.
You saw that ultimately in the watch, which is, you know, in combination with AirPods, which were also an idea born out of the watch development process. It's ultimately become a really large multi-billion dollar wearables business. You later saw that in the development of services, which was an outgrowth of Tim Cook and his colleagues recognition that the iPhone that was in more than a billion people's pockets had become, you know, perhaps the most powerful distribution system in the world.
And Apple had potential to make more money selling software and services across that device. Then it did just in selling the device itself. By that point, it was going to continue to get people to upgrade to a new iPhone every two, three, four years in the interim. What it was going to be able to do was, you know, sell them subscriptions to Apple Music or Spotify or HBO Max. And in doing so, it could take a 30% cut of those sales and benefit every single month that people paid their subscription. And that became a massive business for Apple with really, really high margins. The profits on that are great because they didn't have to put a ton of work into it. They'd already sold the iPhone.
And these are the ways that Tim managed to steer Apple forward by sort of finding a new strategy for its business and continuing to make sure that their existing product line was robust and still in demand for people.
On the services in platform side, one way in which Apple has to distinguish itself is as an unlikely champion of privacy. It stands apart from the rest of the industry and kind of taking a stand against the free flow of user information to advertisers and developers. What do you know about Tim Cook's involvement in this decision, which is largely an opposition to where the rest of the industry wants to go?
Yeah, I mean, this was something that Tim channeled from Steve Jehob. Steve Jehob said had a really strong position on privacy and Tim Cook picked up that mantle and carried it forward in part because it was already something that was inside the company. I mean, it was something that its employees really believed strongly in that Apple was different than Facebook and Google.
Facebook and Google were focused on, as Tim Cook likes to say, making people the product. Whereas Apple was focused on selling its devices, not selling advertisements to people that were kind of built around what people wanted and needed.
So Tim spent a lot of time shortly after taking over a CEO, thinking through the parameters of what that might mean. One of the questions that he wrestled with was, well, what happens if there's some awful incident in a terrorist attack where somebody has an iPhone and there's information on the iPhone or if there's a hostage taken and some law enforcement official has an iPhone and says, well, if we can just get into this, we'll know where that person is. And Tim wrestled with, how do you answer that question?
He would meet with the legal team and talk through those issues. And he developed just a firm sense that what's, this is Apple's marketing material, but like what's on your iPhone stays on your iPhone. It's not Apple's to turn it over. Apple's not big brother. It is merely the maker of the device and the seller device. And we saw this ultimately come to a head when he was very decisive and rejecting the FBI's request to unlock an iPhone after the San Bernardino terrorist incident and late 2015.
Well, let's think about the present day of the Ford Company. What services and projects do you think Tim and his team are working on developing right now? Clearly, we have leaks and announcements every once in a while, but perhaps a broader view.
Yeah, I mean, they're, they're focused has been on trying to bring Ford a field that a lot of people have anticipated been anticipating for a long time. The people are calling spatial computing. Essentially, it's, it's mixed reality. It's virtual reality and augmented reality blurt together.
And Apple's been at work on making some people call goggles. You could call it goggles or headset that would allow people to have a mixed reality experience where they could do anything from watch content through these goggles, through this headset on their face to play games to, you know, if you were, say, a designer and artist, draw or illustrate or develop something and see kind of what it looks like in a spatial sense as you're completing it.
Think, think of a car designer, for example, if, you know, they would maybe model something inside a computer and then be able to wear this headset and, you know, see a, an augmented representation or a digital representation of a car in a warehouse with the actual stitching that they had designed for the car seats and what the leather looked like and the color that they had chosen. And that's been at the forefront of what Apple's been working on and is expected to be released at some point this year.
So in that sense, they seem aligned with Facebook meta, believing that augmented reality or virtual reality is the future. But in recent days, certainly the world has been caught by, surprised by the storm of chat GPT and AI. What is Apple cooking up there?
I mean, one of the things that Apple has struggled with over the years is how do they make Siri perform in a way that is that fulfills people's expectations and the promises of what that product was when I was introduced shortly before Steve Jobs' death. They've tinkered with it over the years and haven't quite gotten it there. And that's really probably the most public-facing example of what they do in the world of AI.
They have, you know, obviously, huge teams of engineers that work in that field and they've been working to improve what's called the knowledge graph for Siri so that it can feel requests more effectively.
他们拥有庞大的工程师团队,致力于改进 Siri 的知识图谱,以便能更有效地响应请求。
But Apple still has work to do in this area and in this arena. And one thing that's worth noting when it comes to chat GPT is that that is happening sort of outside their field of vision. I mean, that really seems to be an arms race in the world of search, email, and productivity work, right?
We're still as the dominant way that people write and send things. People does have its own suite of productivity software like pages and its email service. But those are somewhat of an afterthought relative to those that are offered by tech peers. And, you know, if you were to talk to people who really look at this and speculate on what Apple could do, one of the things that they could do is they could introduce some hardware that makes chat GPT more of an aspect of your daily life or some generative AI more of an aspect of your daily life.
So when you think back to the headset, we were just talking about, imagine some future where you have glasses on your face and you ask some query and it provides an answer right there in the corner of your glasses. That might be one way that you could get more information or you could have glasses that are kind of scanning the world around you and you're walking down a path and there's an evergreen tree to the right and the glasses happen to have a camera that captures the glimpse of the evergreen tree and you know, a generative AI tool is able to tell you what the actual species of that tree is.
The story that we've covered in this series of business movers has been Tim's succession of Steve Jobs. And it's probably not a surprise that Tim is nearing retirement age himself and is thinking about his own plans of succession.
What do you think he's thinking about in setting up the next CEO of Apple for success? Under Tim Cook, Apple's become an empire. I mean, it is, it is every bit as influential in the world as the United States government, you know, the Chinese Communist Party. And so as Tim thinks about who succeeds him, one of his strengths over the past decade has been his ability to navigate politics and geopolitics and that's going to have to be something that he thinks about and who he taps as a successor.
Somebody who has those sensibilities that he's shown that have allowed Apple to navigate tricky issues like President Trump and the trade war with China. The other thing that I'll have to figure out because each successor that Apple moves on from Steve Jobs makes them more distant from that kind of creative spirit and the messaging of Steve Jobs.
So Tim will want to pick somebody who's familiar with the ethos that Steve brought to bear inside the company and what his vision for creativity inside Apple myth while Apple has struggled to maintain that to the satisfaction of some people like Johnny Ive, you still want to be sure that whoever succeeds Tim Cugg is somebody who understands that and pushes that through the company because it's key to their future and their, you know, and their ultimate success.
This is a business podcast and many of the more instructional and favorite stories listeners enjoy are founding stories. The story of the scrappy startup that turns into something spectacular through the sheer grit and genius of the people who made it. Tim Cugg's story is not exactly that. This is a succession story. This is taking something special and maintaining its special status and perhaps improving it in ways that invite controversy or critique. But I'd still like to hear your opinion about what our listeners can learn from Tim Cugg's journey in this precarious and difficult movement from iconic co-founder to an iconic global company.
Here we talked about Steve Jobs' message to Tim before his death, which was, don't do what I would do, essentially be yourself. It sounds simple on its surface and easy to execute, but I can only imagine how difficult that must have been, especially, you know, for someone like Tim Cugg who knew he was so remarkably different from Steve Jobs, who was a one of a kind individual.
Tim Cugg's a one of a kind individual, but has very different strengths. Tim really recognized those strengths and then I think he took two things with him that were already part of him and leaned on those skills to make sure that what he did sustained the company going forward. And those two things were patience and persistence. Apple, you know, was quick to act when it was a smaller company. Tim made sure that as it became a bigger company, that it was patient and persistent and what it did. So that, for example, the Apple Watch, when it was introduced and it didn't fulfill the company's own internal expectations, that the company continued to tweak around the edges to make sure that the marketing got right and that the product did find its legs and take off and get adopted fairly broadly. He's taken some of the same approach to services and he's been persistent in pushing that forward. And I think those are two strengths of his that are easy to overlook, but were critical to the success that Apple's had and that he's had as a leader.
Now that the after-steve book is out and has been for about a year now, what are you working on now? Well, I'm covering Apple now for the New York Times in addition to the broader tech world and I'm very focused on the issues of wayoffs and that job. And then I'm looking at other ways to write about leaders and transformative leaders and have some book ideas in mind. Well I hope whatever succeeds this most recent book is just as successful.
Trip, Michael, thank you so much for speaking with me today on Business Movers. Thanks so much for having me. That was my conversation with journalist and author Trip, Nicol. His latest book is called After Steve, How Apple Became a Trillion Dollar Company and Lost Its Solar. From one read, this is the final episode on our series on Tim Cook and Apple, on the next season of Business Movers.
In the 1970s, Sam Walton stepped away from his retail empire Walmart. But with Sam gone, the company nearly buckles under the weight of a power struggle at the executive level. The stress with how his company is being run in his absence, Sam comes out of semi-retirement with a vengeance, determined to write the ship and take his company to the next level.
If you'd like to learn more about Tim Cook, we recommend After Steve, by our guest on this episode, Trip, Nicol, and Haunted Empire, Apple After Steve Jobs, by Yucari Iwatani Kane. This episode contains reenactments and dramatized details. And while in most cases we can't know exactly what was said, all our dramatizations are based on historical research.
Business Movers has hosted, edited, and executed produced by me, Lindsey Graham, for airship. Audio editing by Emily Burke, Sound Design by Molly Bach, Music by Lindsey Graham. This episode is written and researched by William Simpson. Executive producers are Steven Walters for airship and Aaron O'Flaherty, Jenny Lauer Beckman from Marshall Louis for Wondering.