[observationist]

You make it sound like it's merit or competence that landed Cook in that position, and that he somehow has earned the prestige of the position?

I could buy that argument about Jobs. Cook is just a guy with a title. He follows rules and doesn't get fired, but otherwise does everything he can with all the resources at his disposal to make as much money as possible. Given those same constraints and resources, most people with an IQ above 120 would do as well. Apple is an institution unto itself, and you'd have to repeatedly, rapidly, and diabolically corrupt many, many layers of corporate protections to hurt the company intentionally. Instead, what we see is simple complacency and bureaucracy chipping away at any innovative edge that Apple might once have had.

Maintenance and steady piloting is a far different skillset than innovation and creation.

Make no mistake, Cook won the lottery. He knew the right people, worked the right jobs, never screwed up anything big, and was at the right place at the right time to land where he is. Good for him, but let's not pretend he got where he is through preternatural skill or competence.

I know it's a silicon valley trope and all, but the c-class mythos is so patently absurd. Most of the best leaders just do their best to not screw up. Ones that actually bring an unusual amount of value or intellect to the table are rare. Cook is a dime a dozen.

[A_D_E_P_T]

I was with you until your last sentence. By all accounts Cook was one of the world's most effective managers of production and logistics -- a rare talent. He famously streamlined Apple's stock-keeping practices when he was a new hire at Apple. How much he exercises that talent in his day-to-day as CEO is not perfectly clear; it may perhaps have atrophied.

In any case, "dime a dozen" doesn't do him justice -- he was very accomplished, in ways you can't fake, before becoming CEO.

[observationist]

I look at it from a perspective of interchangeability - if you swapped Steve Ballmer in for Cook, nothing much would have changed. Same if you swapped Nadella in for Pichai, or Pichai for Cook. Very few of these men are exceptional; they are ordinary men with exceptional resources at hand. What they can do, what they should do, and what they can get away with, unseen, govern their impact. Leaders that actually impact their institutions are incredibly rare. Our current crop of ship steadying industry captains, with few exceptions, are not towering figures of incredible prowess and paragons of leadership. They're regular guys in extraordinary circumstances. Joe Schmo with an MBA, 120 IQ, and the same level of institutional knowledge and 2 decades of experience at Apple could have done the same as Cook; Apple wouldn't have looked much different than it does now.

There's a tendency to exaggerate the qualities of men in positions like this. There's nothing inherent to their positions requiring greatness or incredible merit. The extraordinary events already happened; their job is to simply not screw it up, and our system is such that you'd have to try really, really hard to have any noticeable impact, let alone actually hurt a company before the institution itself cuts you out. Those lawyers are a significant part of the organism of a modern mega corporation; they're the substrate upon which the algorithm that is a corporation is running. One of the defenses modern corporations employ is to limit the impact any individual in the organization can have, positive or otherwise, and to employ intense scrutiny and certainty of action commensurate with the power of a position.

Throw Cook into an start-up arena against Musk, Gates, Altman, Jobs, Buffet, etc, and he'd get eaten alive. Cook isn't the scrappy, agile, innovative, ruthless start-up CEO. He's the complacent, steady, predictable institutional CEO coasting on the laurels of his betters, shielded from the trials they faced through the sheer inertia of the organization he currently helms.

They're different types of leaders for different phases of the megacorp organism, and it's OK that Cook isn't Jobs 2.0 - that level of wildness and unpredictability that makes those types of leaders their fortunes can also result in the downfall of their companies. Musk acts with more freedom; the variance in behavior results in a variance of fortunes. Apple is more stable because of Cook, but it's not because he's particularly special. Simply steady and sane.

[philwelch]

> They're different types of leaders for different phases of the megacorp organism, and it's OK that Cook isn't Jobs 2.0 - that level of wildness and unpredictability that makes those types of leaders their fortunes can also result in the downfall of their companies.

This is absolutely true. But that doesn’t imply that Tim Cook is so unexceptional that anyone with a 120 IQ could do the same job he does. The fact that Steve Jobs himself trusted Cook as his right hand man and successor when Apple probably has literally thousands of employees with at least a 120 IQ should be a sign of that.

Partly because little of this is really a question of intelligence. If you want to talk about it in psychometric terms, based on what I’ve read about the man he also seems to have extraordinarily high trait conscientiousness and extraordinarily low trait neuroticism. The latter of the two actually seems extremely common among corporate executive types—one gets the sense from their weirdly flat and level affect that they are preternaturally unflappable. (Mitt Romney also comes across this way.) I don’t recall where I read this, but I remember reading Jobs being quoted once that Cook was a better negotiator that he was because unlike Jobs, Cook never lost his cool. This isn’t the sign of an unexceptional person, just a person who is exceptional in a much different way than someone like Steve Jobs. And, contrary to what you claim at the top of your comment, someone like Tim Cook is pretty distinguishable from someone like Steve Ballmer in the sense that Ballmer didn’t actually do a good job running Microsoft. I don’t know if that was related to his more exuberant personality—being a weirdly unflappable corporate terminator isn’t the only path to success—but it is a point against these guys being fungible.

[aym62SAE49CZ684]

Jobs was growth stocks, Cook is fixed income. Each has their place, and there are good and bad versions of each.

[r00fus]

> I look at it from a perspective of interchangeability - if you swapped Steve Ballmer in for Cook, nothing much would have changed.

This is quite ridiculous. "Developers x3" Ballmer would have face-planted at Apple. He only coasted so far at Microsoft because Gates had already won the platform war.

[cyanydeez]

Historians often debate whether Hitler was some supernatural leader, or a product of a culture looking for a scapegoat.

I'm on the side of culture. That's what I see with most of the business leaders.