Using only one word to send email, Tim Cook still shows Apple leadership qualities

In 2011, when Steve Jobs gave power to COO Tim Cook, people feared that the Apple empire would derail from the rails. At that time, Apples were only worth less than $ 400 billion. Today, the company is about to hit the $ 2 trillion market cap.

How can someone with 11 years at IBM and 6 months as a senior director at Compaq turn Apple into such a great empire? There must be a lot of influencing factors, but a little detail has been revealed recently that partly explains why Tim Cook himself, and no one else, was chosen by Steve Jobs as his successor.

This detail was mentioned in a hearing at the end of July of the US House of Representatives with a group of four most powerful CEOs in America, including Tim Cook. According to documents provided by the US Department of Justice, around January 2015, Tim Cook received a letter of complaint from an app developer for iOS.

In the email, the unnamed character identified himself as an “Apple maniac”, working in a company that owns millions of iOS users. Despite always having to adapt to the App Store’s strict censorship and change of ‘don’t know where to go’, this person remained happy and satisfied with Apple, until the app 10 million downloads. This British company was taken down.

Falling into a dead-end and hopeless appeal, he wrote a very long letter to Tim Cook. It was not clear how Tim Cook responded at the time, but the vacant Apple CEO quickly forwarded the contents of the letter to three of his closest subordinates, senior deputy directors Eddie Cue, Phil Schiller, and Craig Federighi with Only one English word:

“Thoughts?” (roughly translated: Think?)

Partner complaint letter to Tim Cook

The time when Tim Cook sent the letter was 9pm on Sunday. He does not ignore his partner’s complaints email among the countless letters he receives each day, but also does not rush to request an explanation or handle the case immediately.

Tim Cook is probably like Jeff Bezos, who receives complaints from his partner every day. But Cook didn’t scare his subordinates with a single letter ‘?’ soulless like the way Bezos sends emails. Instead, Tim Cook seeks to sincerely share opinions from his subordinates.

By giving a brief message to find the answer to a difficult problem, this is how senior leaders like Tim Cook do their jobs as quickly, neatly, as quickly as possible. .

This partly reflects the exact way Tim Cook treats employees at Apple, as the Wall Street Journal once described the 60-year-old CEO as ‘prudent, cooperative, and tactic’.

Tim Cook’s leadership seems to be in stark contrast to his predecessor Steve Jobs, who is known for his ability to manipulate other people’s thoughts and his ability to ‘bend reality’. And while leading Apple to pioneer the touchscreen era, Jobs himself admitted that collaborative exchange was not one of his strengths.

That is why, before his death, Steve Jobs told his successor Tim Cook: “Don’t ask me what to do. Do what you think is right. And the rest of that statement has become history.