Two Ways Tim Cook Isn't Like Steve Jobs, One Unprintable!

In Apple 's earning call today, Tim Cook underpromised—but without a hint that he would overdeliver. "Our teams are hard at work on some amazing new hardware and software and services for this fall and throughout 2014," he said. So that iPhone 5S or 6 or the "budget" iPhone, not coming until Fall—soonest. And iTV or iWatch or even the iPhablet? Still on the drawing board. And some of that "really great stuff" coming on the "very substantial roadmap," could be software and services—not what we're most looking for from Apple.

The most obvious contrast between Tim Cook and his predecessor is that Steve Jobs was a visionary. He saw it all in every detail and was just impatiently waiting for everyone else to catch up with him. This may have been infuriating, but it was also inspiring and (for the most part) productive.

A great post on Medium last week by former Apple-staffer Erin Caton titled "You Are Not Steve Jobs" gets at the difference between the new and old regimes. The "you" Caton is talking about is not Tim Cook, but an inexperienced and arrogant startup founder. "A young CEO storms through his start-up, a tiny Godzilla, crushing the feelings of his staff like so many Japanese paper maché buildings." This "Godzilla CEO" worships Steve Jobs and wants to be just like him.

The problem is, Caton's experience of Jobs was of "a giant jerk [with] a pile of minions that hero-worshiped him no matter what he did." She considered him to be "an abusive husband to an entire company." But how do you really feel?

Having a vision is one thing. Making sure that it becomes reality is another. There are, perhaps, less insistent visionaries, but they don't make as much happen.

Caton, for herself, does not feel that the ends justify the means, but offers, "at least he had a track record of success." Her advice to the arrogant putz that she is addressing is, "If you do not have his history, maybe consider being nice to your staff."

And this is where it comes back to Tim Cook. Everything he said today was consistent with Apple being a successful and stable company. It's probably a much more reasonable place to work under Cook than Jobs. But that's not what we expect from Apple and it's not what Apple's stock has ben priced on.

This is the thing about Jobs, as Sydney Finklestein wrote in thses pages in January, "Steve Jobs was an exception to all the rules on effective leadership. Let’s make it clearer: almost anyone who adopts the Steve Jobs approach to leadership will fail." But Jobs was able to both set really aggressive (and some might say unrealistic) targets and then motivated his people (through any means necessary) to deliver—with excellence. And he did that, without fail, for more than a decade.

We've already seen that when Tim Cook fast tracks something, like Apple Maps, he has not gotten Jobs-like results. And now we are also seeing that he has pulled back from the aggressive targets, as well, to avoid further mishaps and to assure quality control. There are many factors to the success of Apple's products, not all internal to the company, and some the manufacturing variables may be out of Cook's control. But he doesn't seem to be effectively blocking the gains of Samsung and Google .

The problem, I think, is not that Cook is a bad CEO, but that he is not an a******. In a provocatively titled new book, philosopher Aaron James says that a person deserves that epithet, "when, and only when, he systematically allows himself to enjoy special advantages in interpersonal relations out of an entrenched sense of entitlement that immunizes him against the complaints of other people."

Such people, of course, can be socially useful, as was the case with Jobs. James, writing in the Huffington Post on "8 Really Big A******s" calls out Jobs as #4:

His colleague and friend, Jony Ive, summed up Jobs nicely: “when he’s very frustrated ... his way to achieve catharsis is to hurt somebody. And I think he feels he has a liberty and license to do that. The normal rules of social engagement, he feels, don’t apply to him.” That surely isn’t justified by his having turned Apple around or even by his having revolutionized the world we live in within his unfortunately brief lifetime. The case of Jobs shows that we give a******s a lot of often unjustified leeway when they seem to be a force for good.

So, in case you are among those who think that Jony Ive would make a good successor to Steve Jobs should Cook get the boot, you can tell from his assessment of his former boss that he isn't an a****** either! Ive is clearly a visionary, but if we take Bono's word for it, he has a more convivial way of expressing it. Maybe it takes the contrasting temperaments of two people to approximate the singularity that was Steve Jobs. But are Cook and Ive the two?

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