Just do what's right, Jobs had told Cook

When Apple Inc chief executive officer (CEO) Tim Cook took the microphone at a memorial tribute to Steve Jobs at the company’s campus last week, he shared a piece of advice Jobs gave him before his death on October 5.

“Among his last advice he had for me, and for all of you, was to never ask what he would do. ‘Just do what’s right,’” Cook said. Jobs wanted Apple to avoid the trap that Walt Disney Co fell into after the death of its iconic founder, Cook said, where “everyone spent all their time thinking and talking about what Walt would do.”

For Apple, which Jobs co-founded and built into the world’s most valuable technology company, that’s easier said than done. The challenge for Cook and his executive team would be to maintain Jobs’s legacy without being hobbled by it, said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, senior associate dean at the Yale University School of Management.

“You’ve got to be careful you don’t create rituals, which are antithetical to Jobs’s own approach,” Sonnenfeld said. “He was constantly breaking glass and moving forward. Walt Disney was surrounded by a cadre of creative people who were every bit the equal of Jobs’s lieutenants, but they became haunted by the question, ‘What would Walt do?’”

Cook took over as CEO when Jobs resigned in August, and had run day-to-day operations during Jobs’s three medical leaves. Jobs passed away after battling a rare form of pancreatic cancer that was first diagnosed in 2003. Since returning to the company in 1997, Jobs introduced one top-selling product after another, from the first iMac personal computer to the iPod music player, iPhone and iPad tablet, changing the electronics, music, mobile- phone and retail industries along the way.

Walter Isaacson’s 571-page biography of Jobs, which went on sale yesterday, confirms what most people already knew: Jobs was unique. Throughout the book, he alone drives Apple’s business in big and small ways, on everything from what products would be built to which songs would be featured in iTunes TV ads.

Jobs told Isaacson one of his great hopes was Apple would remain as innovative and committed to product excellence after his death. During the memorial on October 19, Apple director Al Gore said Jobs had spent years developing processes to ensure a smooth transition.

Still, in the book, there’s no mention of any detailed plan for how Apple would be run in his absence. Jobs’s comments instead suggest some tricky challenges ahead for Cook.

‘NOT A PRODUCT PERSON’
Jobs has praise for Cook’s operational expertise, yet he acknowledged that products—Jobs’s primary focus, above earnings, employee satisfaction or shareholder returns—aren’t his strong suit, the book says.

“Tim’s not a product person, per se,” Jobs told Isaacson.

That may be balanced out by Jonathan Ive, Apple’s senior vice-president of industrial design, who has “more operational power than anyone else at Apple except me,” Jobs told Isaacson. “There’s no one who can tell him what to do, or to butt out. That’s the way I set it up.”

Cook himself is quoted in the book regarding Jobs’s willingness to take risks. Cook doesn’t name examples, though there are many, such as migrating to Intel Corp chips in its Mac computers, or scrapping the design of the iPhone, causing an expensive delay in its introduction. After his first bout with cancer, Jobs got even bolder, Cook said. “Even though he was running a large company he kept making bold moves that I don’t think anybody else would have done,” Cook told Isaacson.

Ive, meantime, isn’t just the shy artistic genius he’s often portrayed to be, according to the biography. Instead, Ive seems to covet credit. After picking Jobs up at the airport after his liver transplant surgery in 2009, he says he felt “underappreciated” and “devastated” at articles suggesting Apple couldn’t innovate without Jobs.