Benjamin franklin and albert einstein, this is the exclusive biography of steve jobs

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CEO
Still Crazy after All These Years
Tim Cook and Jobs, 2007
Tim Cook
When Steve Jobs returned to Apple and produced the “Think Different” ads and the iMac in his 
first year, it confirmed what most people already knew: that he could be creative and a visionary. 
He had shown that during his first round at Apple. What was less clear was whether he could run a 
company. He had definitely 
not
shown that during his first round.
Jobs threw himself into the task with a detail-oriented realism that astonished those who were 
used to his fantasy that the rules of this universe need not apply to him. “He became a manager, 
which is different from being an executive or visionary, and that pleasantly surprised me,” recalled 
Ed Woolard, the board chair who lured him back.
His management mantra was “Focus.” He eliminated excess product lines and cut extraneous 
features in the new operating system software that Apple was developing. He let go of his control-
freak desire to manufacture products in his own factories and instead outsourced the making of 
everything from the circuit boards to the finished computers. And he enforced on Apple’s 
suppliers a rigorous discipline. When he took over, Apple had more than two months’ worth of 
inventory sitting in warehouses, more than any other tech company. Like eggs and milk, 
computers have a short shelf life, so this amounted to at least a $500 million hit to profits. By 
early 1998 he had halved that to a month.
Jobs’s successes came at a cost, since velvety diplomacy was still not part of his repertoire. 
When he decided that a division of Airborne Express wasn’t delivering spare parts quickly 
enough, he ordered an Apple manager to break the contract. When the manager protested that 
doing so could lead to a lawsuit, Jobs replied, “Just tell them if they fuck with us, they’ll never get 
another fucking dime from this company, ever.” The manager quit, there was a lawsuit, and it took 
a year to resolve. “My stock options would be worth $10 million had I stayed,” the manager said, 
“but I knew I couldn’t have stood it—and he’d have fired me anyway.” The new distributor was 
ordered to cut inventory 75%, and did. “Under Steve Jobs, there’s zero tolerance for not 

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performing,” its CEO said. At another point, when VLSI Technology was having trouble 
delivering enough chips on time, Jobs stormed into a meeting and started shouting that they were 
“fucking dickless assholes.” The company ended up getting the chips to Apple on time, and its 
executives made jackets that boasted on the back, “Team FDA.”
After three months of working under Jobs, Apple’s head of operations decided he could not 
bear the pressure, and he quit. For almost a year Jobs ran operations himself, because all the 
prospects he interviewed “seemed like they were old-wave manufacturing people,” he recalled. He 
wanted someone who could build just-in-time factories and supply chains, as Michael Dell had 
done. Then, in 1998, he met Tim Cook, a courtly thirty-seven-year-old procurement and supply 
chain manager at Compaq Computers, who not only would become his operations manager but 
would grow into an indispensable backstage partner in running Apple. As Jobs recalled:
Tim Cook came out of procurement, which is just the right background for what we needed. I realized 
that he and I saw things exactly the same way. I had visited a lot of just-in-time factories in Japan, and I’
d built one for the Mac and at NeXT. I knew what I wanted, and I met Tim, and he wanted the same 
thing. So we started to work together, and before long I trusted him to know exactly what to do. He had 
the same vision I did, and we could interact at a high strategic level, and I could just forget about a lot of 
things unless he came and pinged me.
Cook, the son of a shipyard worker, was raised in Robertsdale, Alabama, a small town between 
Mobile and Pensacola a half hour from the Gulf Coast. He majored in industrial engineering at 
Auburn, got a business degree at Duke, and for the next twelve years worked for IBM in the 
Research Triangle of North Carolina. When Jobs interviewed him, he had recently taken a job at 
Compaq. He had always been a very logical engineer, and Compaq then seemed a more sensible 
career option, but he was snared by Jobs’s aura. “Five minutes into my initial interview with 
Steve, I wanted to throw caution and logic to the wind and join Apple,” he later said. “My 
intuition told me that joining Apple would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work for a 
creative genius.” And so he did. “Engineers are taught to make a decision analytically, but there 
are times when relying on gut or intuition is most indispensable.”
At Apple his role became implementing Jobs’s intuition, which he accomplished with a quiet 
diligence. Never married, he threw himself into his work. He was up most days at 4:30 sending 
emails, then spent an hour at the gym, and was at his desk shortly after 6. He scheduled Sunday 
evening conference calls to prepare for each week ahead. In a company that was led by a CEO 
prone to tantrums and withering blasts, Cook commanded situations with a calm demeanor, a 
soothing Alabama accent, and silent stares. “Though he’s capable of mirth, Cook’s default facial 
expression is a frown, and his humor is of the dry variety,” Adam Lashinsky wrote in