Tuesdays with Tim Cook
In my first job at Apple, there was a meeting between the sales folks and the ops folks every Tuesday that last anywhere from 2-4 hours. The goal was to look at sales trends and understand two things: did we have supply to meet demand, and did we have demand to meet supply. In other words: if sales were going gang busters, could the ops folks keep up, and if sales weren’t, what was the excuse.
It was my role in this meeting, as a forecaster, to explain two things:
- If we continue on our current pace, where will the quarter finish.
- If last week was a bad week for sales, could it be explained by seasonality (or some supply issue), or did leadership have to kick someone’s ass
I was just a kid, but I liked being the voice of truth. Tim Cook sat at the end of a long table, and I’d try to get there early and sit as close to him as I possibly could. Most folks had more skin in the game than I did, and tried to sit far away, so wasn’t exactly taking someone else’s seat.
For a while, I was focused on the education market, which tends to sell in large clumps, and has big swings up and down. Some weeks were bad enough that they could put the whole quarter meaningfully in jeopardy.
I knew when I joined Apple that Steve Jobs had a reputation for being quite vocal, at times screaming in frustration. I was surprised to see in these meetings that when Tim Cook was disappointed or wanted to get a point across, rather than getting louder and louder, he’d get quieter and quieter. Not like a wimp would, but like Jack Bauer would.
His record in driving the combination of sales success and operational efficiency speaks for itself… very quietly :-)
via Asymco
It’s also funny to remember the time when I came into work with both my eyes full of blown vessels (long story, but this is what I looked like). I took my normal seat by Cook, and went about my business. Over the course of a few hours we made plenty of eye contact and had plenty of discourse, but he never asked about it, never flinched, and never did any double-takes. That guy’s a pro!
