I recently read Adam Lashinsky's post in Fortune on the Cook Doctrine at Apple. The doctrine was articulated at the conference call with investors recently. According to Lashinsky it was a "magical moment." In the interest of a little more light on Apple and its inner workings, I offer up this post.
Much of what Cook said is vintage Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs hammered this into Apple when he came back from NEXT. However, some of Cook's Doctrine might bring a chuckle to ex-Apple folks like myself.
I remember Apple as being a place where being a vice president meant not having to say you are sorry for your errors. Apple's head of HR when I was there told me that vice presidents did not have to account for their mistakes.
As interesting and fun as it might be, Apple's blind eye to its vice presidents' miscalculations is not really where I want to focus this post.
I think I first presented to Tim Cook either in the fall of 1999 or 2000. I had inherited the remnants of Apple's federal sales team. It was down to one person which was a huge drop from the number of people Apple had devoted to the federal government in the early nineties.
I had something of a history with the federal group going back to when Mitch Mandich had come over as Apple's VP of Sales from NEXT with Steve. I had been tasked with evaluating the federal market.
I ended up saying that there was lots of opportunity, and we should take advantage of it.
The response from Mandich was that opportunity did look ripe, and he had just the enterprise people to handle it. They just happened to all be NEXT folks.
Apple federal ended up being a hot potato and went through three different managers, all from NEXT.
When I finally got the memo to lay off all the federal folks except one, the NEXT managers were long gone.
At the time I was running what was called an enterprise district for Apple. We had responsibility for Apple's larger customers on the east coast from Philadelphia south and mostly worked through resellers.
Because they were good customers, and I had one federal rep, we ended up trying to take care of the federal government, though we quickly learned that they could be the trailing edge when it came to technology.
I ended up presenting to another VP and eventually got on Tim Cook's schedule for yet another federal presentation.
What I remember most from the presentation is that Tim was much more interested in tweaking things than taking any real risks.
We had a lot of basic things that needed doing in order to be successful in the federal market, but Tim tended to gravitate towards pricing changes.
Still I got the nod for what looked like a suicide mission. I got two reps and one SE along with my area associate to cover the federal government. We joked that we could hold team meetings in my car.
The federal customers responded very well to some basic attention and our efforts to get OS X on their desktops. We grew business, got more resources, and eventually I convinced Tim Cook to let us have a direct online store for federal agencies and federal employees. Those were extraordinarily successful at the time.
During those few years, I spent more time in Cupertino than I really wanted. I did a number of presentations for customer executive briefings. Tim was a popular guest and presenter. The Army particularly liked Tim and once specifically requested a briefing with him.
Tim's presentation on Apple's logistics revolution captivated a number of Army generals who were wrestling with their own supply chain issues.
The support that I got from Tim Cook was instrumental in our federal success. This sounds like an affirmation of the skills that might be needed at the helm Apple. Apple executive sees opportunity, goes after it and succeeds.
If would be nice for Apple and for Tim Cook if it were that simple. As is often the case, there is a little more to it than that, and the devil is in the details.
Now I have not had anything to do with Tim Cook in over four years with the exception of sending him an email pointing out a huge hole in Apple's product line. Not surprisingly there was no response to that message.
However, people change, they grow, and often leaders mature or develop in that length of time. That happens even to executives at companies like Apple. It is possible that the Tim that I knew might be substantially different than the Tim Cook of today.
But here is what I saw and my conclusions.
There are some characteristics that Tim Cook brings to the table that might be weaknesses in a post Steve Jobs Apple.
Number one in my book is that he is a pretty detached executive. He is exceptionally good with numbers, but I would question his ability to accurately judge people around him. I found him somewhat lacking in skills that often let an executive get to know the people around him well enough to evaluate them.
Number two, as smart as Tim Cook is, he is not an inspiring guy. It is just not there. Perhaps you can say that he can inspire investors and analysts with his intelligence and mastery of the numbers. However, I doubt that you can translate that into inspiration for Apple employees.
A lot of what makes Apple different from other companies is the extra work that comes out of Apple employees. You can argue whether most of it comes from fear or pure love of the technology, but in order to tap than vein with the Apple workforce, you have to have that passion yourself.
I never saw that passion for technology in Tim.
The most important trait that Apple needs and which might be absent in Mr. Cook is the willingness to take a giant leap which is in some respect what Apple's success has been all about. Everything that I worked through Tim was a lesson in doing things incrementally. Again he may have changed, but I really doubt it.
I could also talk about his real lack understanding of the sales process, but Apple has been in its own zone recently with products that required very little selling. Whether they will need a real sales force in the future is an open question. As long as you make products that sell themselves, the sales force is a luxury and that is pure Steve Jobs.
I would expect that Tim Cook can keep Apple humming certainly as long as it takes for the pipeline of products that are already in development to hit the market. Whether or not he has the product savvy and passion to bring the next great hit to Apple is an open question.
It should also be remembered that even the great one, Steve Jobs, probably only created three or four really barn burning hits. If Tim Cook can come up with one, that would still be huge.
I am just hoping we see some great computers in the next twelve months. I know that Tim Cook can get them manufactured and distributed.
What he can do when he owns the product process, only time will tell.
In the rest of my world, not only was I disappointed with MacWorld, but we have had to endure some cold weather and even snow here on the Carolina coast. The good news is that the "snow storm" came on inauguration day so it was an appropriate time to sit by the fire and enjoy a changing of the guard and a wintery diversion.
Real estate here on the coast has shown some preliminary signs of life. However, it is still on life support.
I hope our government, our country and Apple find a new road forward.
Anything is possible since I even have to give Microsoft credit for continuing to bang on Vista to the point that it has become much more usable. I hesitate to brag on it too much, but Vista has come a long way in the sixteen months that I have been using it.
I did manage to make it through all of 2008 without buying a computer. I am on the watch for a new one should I manage to sell the ocean front duplex that I have listed.
In the meantime I will keep on alert for the first hint of fishing weather this spring here on North Carolina's Crystal Coast. Fishing is more fun than computers any day.
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