Wen | Feng Ma Niu (WeChat public number: Feng Lun Feng Ma Niu)
01
The most expensive CEO on the surface
At the beginning of this year, Apple's stock price rose as high as $182.88, and its market value once exceeded $3 trillion, becoming the first company in the world to enter this threshold. $3 trillion, what concept? Using the World Bank's 2020 GDP as a reference, this figure is second only to the United States ($20.9 trillion), China ($14.7 trillion), Japan ($5.06 trillion) and Germany ($3.85 trillion), that is, Apple's market capitalization is equivalent to the world's fifth-largest economy.
Around the same time, Apple unveiled its latest shareholder proxy resolution, which shows that in fiscal 2021, CEO Tim Cook received $98.73 million in compensation, equivalent to about 630 million yuan.
Work for a year and get more than 600 million yuan in wages? Netizens directly call Cook simply the most "expensive" CEO on the surface, and Apple shareholders are really generous. Shareholders are of course generous, in 2021, Apple's revenue reached $365.8 billion (equivalent to about 2359.41 billion yuan), an increase of 33% year-on-year, and net profit reached $94.6 billion (equivalent to about 610.17 billion yuan), an increase of 65% year-on-year, Apple's net sales once again set a historical record, becoming the world's most profitable technology company.
Divide Apple's 2021 net profit and Cook's salary, which equates to a $1 (included in the cost) for every $958.17 the company makes.
Tim Cook, compared to Jobs, apple's soul, seems so low-key that people often overlook the huge influence he had on Apple as his successor, calling Jobs the "Godhead" but "Cook the Cook." But since Cook became Ceo of Apple, Apple's market capitalization has grown from $364.4 billion to nearly $3 trillion today, and if investors had invested $1,000 in Apple from the day he took office, that investment would now be worth about $13,800, with a return of nearly 1,300 percent.
Jobs was a personality, a fierce, legendary genius, his words and deeds were repeatedly mentioned, his biography was a world-class bestseller, and even his memorial service was a gathering of celebrities and everyone.déjà vu. When he was still working at Apple, he would run to the design office almost every day, and every product of Apple reflected his strong personal aesthetic. He shaped Apple's innate genes.
But Cook, he was so dedicated and uninteresting to the outside world. Jobs stood in front of the stage and took a bite of the apple, while Cook hid behind the apple and shaped the apple into a glittering "golden apple": the global revenue increased in large part because Cook knocked on the door of the Chinese market, and the background of this process was the gradual increase in Sino-US trade frictions.
What kind of successor does a company with obvious founder traits need? In the whirlpool of complex Sino-US political and economic issues, how should the CEO of the company be placed in the middle of it to win the greatest benefits for the company? These questions are answered in Cook.
02
What path Cook is taking
In terms of age, Cook is not much like Jobs's successor. Jobs was born in 1955 and Cook was born in 1960, just 5 years apart. But judging from the personalities and experiences of the two, there is no doubt that Jobs chose the best successor for Apple in the "Jobs-free era".
Jobs knew exactly what he lacked—he wasn't a shrewd businessman in the conventional sense.
He dropped out of school to start a business, smoked psychedelic drugs, studied meditation, and in the early days of Apple, he fought with the high-paid CEO John Stuart, but he was inexperienced, and tried to launch a "coup" to replace the CEO, but was swept out by the company. After returning to Apple, he has an amazing dedication to product design, but lacks patience for personnel and industry chain management. Before Cook's arrival, Apple was even doing something like this: sending parts shipped from Asia to factories in Ireland, assembling them into notebooks, and shipping most of them back to the Asian market for sale.
This inefficient, stock-crunching situation changed completely after Cook's arrival.
Compared to the "deviant" Steve Jobs, Cook was a good student. He was born in Alabama in the south of the United States, his father was a shipyard worker, his mother worked in a drugstore, and in Cook's eyes, his family was a typical blue-collar family, in the middle and low class of the United States. Cook grew up step by step: at the age of 22, he received a bachelor's degree in industrial engineering from Auburn University, entered IBM, and worked while taking a master's degree in business administration from Duke University, and after 12 years of work, he reached the level of director. He spent the next 3 years as COO of a smart electronics company, followed by a brief six-month vice president at Compaq Computer. Until a headhunter called, representing Jobs, inviting him into Apple.
At that time, Apple was already a company with obvious decline, and in the face of this professional invitation, people around Cook persuaded him to stay in Compaq, but he first met with Jobs, talked for less than 5 minutes, and decided to put aside caution and logic and join Apple. "My gut feeling was that joining Apple was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work for a creative genius and become part of an executive team to revive a great American company," he later recalled.
Genius, revival, greatness.
Cook was cautious and humble, rarely uttering such inflammatory words, and it was clear that he had been captured by Jobs. In 1998, Cook officially joined Apple in his first position as senior vice president of global operations.
Global business, what to do, to market Apple's products all over the world? No, Cook's first priority is "doing well" than "selling well."
His massive shutdown of Apple's factories and warehouses and his instead contracted with the world's leading manufacturers to reduce Apple's inventory turnover from months to days on a foundry basis was immediate, and just a few months later, Apple became a fast-paced tech company that maintained only six days of inventory, which at the time was equivalent to $78 million in goods, in stark contrast to $437 million worth of inventory in the previous year. 2 years later, this figure was compressed into a 2-day inventory worth $20 million.
Low inventory and high turnover bring about Apple's increasingly abundant cash flow. In 2021, Apple's net cash reserves reached $267.2 billion.
What Cook did, in popular theory, called optimizing global value chains (GVC), was first mentioned in the mid-1990s and widely studied in economics after 2001, but Cook used it as soon as he took office.
Schematic diagram of GVC operation
In addition, Cook has always valued long-term investments.
Since 2005, Apple has invested in flash memory, a storage medium that is vital in the age of smart electronics. The investment was well valued, and the success of Jobs's later representative works, the iPod Nano, iPhone and iPad, was inseparable from the widespread use of flash memory.
In 2008, Apple bought arm architecture licenses and acquired a microprocessor design company and its related patents. Two years later, Apple introduced the A4, a self-developed processor, replacing the Samsung processor. In 2020, Apple launched the MacBook series of computers equipped with the self-developed processor M1, which far exceeds the processor of the industry's elder Intel. Not only that, Apple's efforts to launch self-developed basebands, CPUs and OLED screens have never stopped. These are inseparable from Cook, the master of cost control.
Cook studied industrial engineering, and read an MBA, of course, know that self-developed core technology investment is large, but as long as the research and development is successful, not only can make their own products stable shipments, not subject to the control of other manufacturers, but also improve bargaining power, expand profits. Cook doesn't make loss-making trades.
In addition to the management of the industrial chain, Cook also has a set of company personnel management.
Cook is known as a "humble work machine", he gets up at 4 o'clock every morning, starts checking work emails at 4:30, communicates with employees in a gentle manner, and mingles with "fruit fans" when attending Apple events, but Cook manages people and never is soft.
Cook attended the event and took a group photo with "Fruit Powder"
In October 2012, one year after Jobs's death, Cook made a major adjustment to the company's executive team: the senior vice president of iOS was removed, only the consultant status remained, and after a year, even the consultant had no need to do it, and turned around and left the company. The senior vice president of retail joined only 6 months and was fired by Cook because the results did not meet expectations. One of Jobs's former confidants was suspended, and responsibilities were assigned to four executives. Cook values building his own management team, preferring a "more harmonious" culture rather than a mixed atmosphere of genius and eccentricity in the Jobs era, which allowed him to eliminate many of the people Jobs had been close to.
On the basis of personnel management, Cook puts forward higher requirements for the supply chain: According to media reports, in the case of Apple's daily product shipments of hundreds of thousands of units, there was an order for 25 units sent to the wrong destination, and Cook was very angry about it.
03
The story behind the story
Since officially taking over as CEO of Apple in 2011, there are not a few netizens who call Cook "cook", which was originally a literal translation of the English joke, but if you look at it from the perspective of responding to the needs of different groups of people, Cook is indeed a good cook who can make a variety of tastes.
When Cook first entered Apple, HR had arranged a spacious office under Jobs according to his position, but Cook refused, asking for the office to be set up near Jobs, even if it was a small office. As Jobs's "deputy", Cook has been doing it for 12 years, Jobs was born in the center of the stage, but Cook is very happy to avoid the stage, when the PPT behind the person. One Apple executive said, "Cook is the story behind those stories."
Jobs has his own signature outfit: black top + jeans, and when Cook and Jobs are present, he will also match Jobs's outfit. After officially becoming CEO, Cook no longer insisted on these details. See Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who wears a black suit with a blue tie; visits the Apple Store with Huang Qifan, the mayor of Chongqing at the time, who wears a white shirt and black suit pants like the other party; speaks at the Global Developers Conference, wears anything, and smiles like the old king next door with the developers, never playing cool.
Cook and Jobs
Cook's versatility is also shown in Apple's product strategy.
When Jobs was alive, Apple already had several big fist products: Mac series, iPhone series, iPad series, and the tall buildings had laid a good foundation, and when Cook became a leader, it seemed that he only needed to continue to add bricks and tiles to repair it.
What did Cook do when he took office? First of all, to enrich the product color and price range, Jobs's goal is to "provide the best product", Cook refined it into "the best product for people with different spending power", which is indispensable for Apple to open up the market in China and other developing countries. Secondly, enriching Apple's product ecology, hardware such as headphones, smart speakers, and displays, as well as software services such as Siri and iCloud, are all supplements to the three major fist products, and firmly grasp every consumer who enters the Apple product circle.
In recent years, Sino-US trade frictions have continued, and how Apple, as an American company, ensures its interests in the Chinese market is also an important embodiment of Cook's management style.
2013 is regarded as the first year of big data, and various countries are gradually recognizing "data security" as an important part of national security, and how to deal with the large amount of user data obtained by multinational technology companies like Apple has become a sensitive issue. In 2016, Apple's built-in services iTunes and iBooks were discontinued in Chinese mainland, and it was also the year that the Guizhou provincial government began negotiations with Apple and finally won the iCloud China project.
On February 28, 2018, the iCloud data of Chinese mainland users was officially transferred to the operation of "Guizhou on the Cloud", a state-owned enterprise, and the Guizhou Provincial Big Data Bureau was its competent unit until the end of 2018. Despite the outward statement that it is a cooperation, many people believe that this is Apple's compromise with the Chinese government - handing over the data management rights of Chinese mainland users.
Someone questioned Cook about it, and Cook responded, "I have a strong personal opinion that you have to play and participate, because staying on the sidelines doesn't change anything." The results are obvious and easy to see, and the Chinese market has become an important support for Apple's strong growth in recent years.
04
How to avoid the "genius trap"
On the issue of corporate succession, someone once proposed a concept: the genius trap. This means that talented and influential founders have become part of the company's brand, becoming not only representatives of the company's external image, but also the touchstone for others to test the company's decisions. When the founder leaves, whenever people see the company make any decisions, the first thought is what the founder will do, rather than facing a complex and changeable market, what the company should do, once people's expectations are different from the company's actual decisions, it will cause questions.
This trap is very difficult for successors to escape.
For a long time, Cook has faced this kind of doubt: when the iPhone and Mac launched a rich color matching, people will constantly recall the classic color matching of the Jobs era, mocking Cook's complete lack of aesthetics; when the iPad launched the stylus, someone took out Jobs's mocking handwriting remarks, proving that Apple was going back in the way.
In 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. At this time, he and Cook have been fighting side by side for 5 years, and then he launched the iPhone and iPad that swept the world with the support of the strong supply chain built by Cook. In the final stages of his life, Jobs faced death threats and chose Cook, who was completely different from him, rather than another creative genius to manage Apple. They all know that Apple only needs a Jobs.
One Apple executive has publicly described Cook as an "extremely intelligent and unselfish person." Cook also revealed his solution to the genius trap early on: "When you continue the career of a great man, your task is not to do what he has done, but to keep yourself, try to do what you are good at, expand your strengths, and ensure that the areas you are not good at can be completed by the collective." 」
Today, it seems that some of what Jobs left behind continues to be passed down in the Apple Design Office, a place where Jobs used to go every day and Cook would barely set foot. In addition, Cook, with his superb management ability, fulfilled all the shareholder expectations for apple as a company, except for design.
This is perhaps the most realistic solution to the problem of corporate shift handover.
Source:
[1] Steve Blank: Why Tim Cook is Steve Ballmer, Venture Beat
[2] James Vincent: Tim Cook reportedly traveling to China following closure of Apple's online stores, The Verge
[3] Nicolas Vega: Tim Cook became CEO of Apple 10 years ago. Here’s how much money you’d have if you invested $1,000 in the tech giant the day he took over, CNBC
[4] Tripp Mickle: How Tim Cook Made Apple His Own, The Wall Street Journal
[5] Ruper Neate: Tim Cook plans to donate $800m fortune to charity before he dies, The Guardian
[6] Yukari Iwatani Kane: The Job After Steve Jobs: Tim Cook and Apple, The Wall Street Journal
Image from the web
The author of this article | Mao Hongtao Editor-in-Chief| Wang Tao
Editor| Chen Runjiang Consultant | Wang Shuqi