[ESL Tutorials] - Tim Cook Is No Steve Jobs And That May Be A Good Thing

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There’s no doubt Tim Cook has a very tough job. When he stepped in as CEO of Apple he was following in the footsteps of one of the most—if not the most—iconic entrepreneurs in history. Every step would be scrutinized by a legion of die hard fans and magnified a thousandfold.
Yet Cook has performed admirably. The stock has more than doubled since he took over in August 2011 and Apple just posted the best quarter for any company ever. Despite aggressive share buybacks, the company is still sitting on a mountain of cash—more than $170 billion!
Tim Cook is no Steve Jobs and that may actually be a good thing. Unlike the bombastic Apple founder, he’s been even-keeled, launching no vendettas and creating no controversies. Although there has been a lack of blockbuster launches, the company is an operational wunderkind. Here’s how Cook is doing things differently than his famous predecessor.
Partnership Over Prickliness
While Steve Jobs was loved by consumers, he was in many ways less popular in Silicon Valley. His mercurial personality made him famously hard to work with and that, combined with his passion for controlling every aspect of the user experience, made it hard for Apple to forge effective partnerships with other companies.
In a joint interview with Bill Gates shortly before he died, Jobs himself acknowledged the problem.

You know, because Woz and I started the company based on doing the whole banana, we weren’t so good at partnering with people. And, you know, actually, the funny thing is, Microsoft’s one of the few companies we were able to partner with that actually worked for both companies. And we weren’t so good at that, where Bill and Microsoft were really good at it because they didn’t make the whole thing in the early days and they learned how to partner with people really well.
Cook has been considerably more successful in this regard. Take the new partnership with IBM, which gives Big Blue unique access to Apple’s development team while at the same time allowing Apple to leverage IBM’s strong enterprise sales capabilities. It’s hard to imagine Jobs being pulling that one off.
Still, Cook has somehow managed to stay true to the values that makes Apple the company that it is. Not only does the deal give Apple greater reach into the lucrative enterprise business—which has long been a weak spot—it gives Cook and his team greater control over the end product than if IBM were developing apps alone.
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