Apple CEO Tim Cook.
(Credit: CBS Interactive)
Despite Tim Cook's own analysis and the advice of his friends, the Apple
chief executive let his gut make the final decision 15 years ago on whether to
take a job at the then-struggling Mac maker.
Cook, who joined Apple in 1998 as a senior vice president of worldwide
operations, revealed his thinking on the matter during an onstage interview in
April at his alma mater, the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. Even
though he considers himself an analytical engineer at heart, he said he often
trusts his intuition for important decisions, calling his Apple decision
"a prime example."
"I remember forming my list of pluses and minuses and I could not get
the chart to work out the way that I wanted it to," he said during the
interview, video of which was only recently made available to the media.
"I wanted something to say, you know, this says I should go to Apple, but
it would not -- nothing financially would do that."
Cook, who had just joined hardware-maker Compaq after 12 years at IBM,
said his intuition was criticized by those from whom he had sought advice.
I talked to people I trusted that
knew me and they said, "This is not what you should do." It wasn't so
easy. And people said, "You know, you are just crazy. You are working for
the top PC company in the world. How could you even think of doing this? You've
lost your mind." And yet that voice said, "Go west, young man. Go
west." And sometimes you just have to go for it.
The hard part, apparently, was convincing Cook that he wanted to work at
Apple in the first place -- a company that had recently held as little as 4
percent of the computer market.
During an onstage
interview at the D10 conference last year, Cook
recounted how he had been recruited from Compaq, where he worked as vice
president of corporate materials. After rejecting multiple overtures from an
executive search firm hired by Apple CEO Steve Jobs to find an operations
executive, Cook finally agreed to an interview and caught a red-eye flight from
Houston on a Saturday morning to meet with Apple.
"It was a very
interesting meeting," he said. "Five minutes into the conversation, I
am wanting to join Apple. I am shocked at this because it wasn't what I
envisioned at all."
After serving as
Apple's COO for several years, Cook was named Apple's chief executive in 2011
upon Jobs' resignation.
The
portion of the interview focusing on his job decision is below. (source: cnet)
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