What are the chief elements of Tim Cook’s overall leadership and management style?

Response to Student’s Posts

2 Discussion Responses

In March 2015, Tim Cook (Cook), the CEO of technology giant, Apple Inc. (Apple), was named as the “world’s greatest leader” of the world’s most valuable company by Fortune magazine. Apple, a US-based company, designed, manufactured, and marketed mobile communication and media devices, personal computers, and portable digital music players, and sold a variety of related software, services, peripherals, networking solutions, and third-party digital content and applications. Despite being regularly compared with his immediate predecessor and legendary founder CEO, Steve Jobs (Jobs), Cook had his own strengths. Since becoming the CEO, Cook had transformed himself from a soft-spoken operations manager to a high-profile leader of an increasingly decentralized, team-oriented culture at Apple. The company also offered dividends and share repurchases to investors for the first time in its history, boosting its stock price. Cook still faced a number of management challenges, including consumers’ disappointment with some of new products like Apple Maps and Siri and the hiring fiasco of John Browett as Apple’s retail chief.

By 2014, Cook was finally stepping out of the shadow of Jobs. In October 2014, Cook announced publicly that he was gay. Cook also used the platform as Apple’s CEO to opine on subjects as diverse as human rights, access to education, female representation on Wall Street, immigration reform, privacy rights, and racial inequality in his home state of Alabama. Cook also took an interest in philanthropy and had plans to give away all his wealth. Under him, Apple was also gradually shedding its image of a sustainability laggard, becoming a much more socially aware and philanthropic company, and working to improve conditions in its overseas factories. By 2015, as markets for Apple’s iPhone and iPad had matured, it was yet to be seen whether a new product like the Apple Watch, or a new service like Apple Pay, or Apple’s acquisition of Beats would restore Apple’s past growth rate or even be financially successful.

1. What are the chief elements of Tim Cook’s overall leadership and management style? How well is it working? Is his style evolving?
2. How do you think Tim Cook’s leadership style affects the decision making process at Apple

DQ1

Both have a completely different style of leading their troops. I love both of them. I love Cook for carrying forward Job’s philosophy and ethics and even improving them. Cook is a silent guy who doesn’t react much to critics but keeps a note of them. He is a thinker, cool, calm and disciplined. The guy has a great negotiating skills. The way he cracked a deal with China Mobile is awesome. Also, he is committed and seriously wants to carry forward Job’s philosophy of Customer Satisfaction first and Always make the best product in the world. Steve is a legend. He has brought Apple from the verge of bankruptcy to being the biggest company in the world in terms of market cap. straight forward person, he liked to keep things simple and you can see that philosophy in all his products. May it be iPhone, iPad, iPod, Mac; he pioneered the best products in the world and all are industry standards in their respective field. That says a lot.

The goal of the NeXT acquisition was to bring Jobs back into the fold as Apple’s leader. From that point, Jobs became the face of Apple all the way until he stepped down in 2011. Jobs handpicked his successor, and Tim Cook, the current CEO, stepped into power at the end of 2011. While many people have criticized him for not running Apple like Steve Jobs would, Jobs reportedly told Cook on his death bed to “never ask himself, ‘What would Steve Jobs do?'” This highlights the fact that Jobs knew the exact person he picked to replace him, and for good reason. Apple has continued its phenomenal success since Cook took over as CEO.

Management Style: The first and most glaring difference is Cook’s unique and different approach to management. Jobs was known as a passionate, albeit abrasive, leader and CEO who demanded perfection and excellence from his staff.

Cook, on the other hand, continues to seek to achieve excellence at Apple, but he does so with a distinctly different management style. He has made an immediate point to stress transparency and teamwork within the Apple organization. Cook tends to have a very calm demeanor, and he is much more approachable than Jobs was. Cook inspires his employees through an open-door policy and by encouraging a collaborative environment at Apple. Cook has some similarities to Jobs in management styles, too. While most of his management techniques are more passive than Jobs’, both Cook and Jobs have kept very high expectations for the company and individual employees as CEOs of Apple. The end result of the differing management styles is the same: massive success for Apple.

However, Jobs was also a dominating individual who often had a hard time admitting when he was wrong. He had a knack for understanding what consumers wanted, but he still made plenty of mistakes in his career. By contrast, Tim Cook seems very open-minded, but he isn’t the kind of inspirational leader Steve Jobs was. However, at this stage in its life, Apple needs a smart, adaptable businessman at the helm more than it needs a disruptive visionary. Thus, Tim Cook may actually be a better fit for Apple right now than Jobs would have been.

DQ2

Tim cook style of management seems to be good. However, Certain Decisions made by cook like stocks sales etc. actually helped the company but on the other side he also failed to address products issues and revenue loss due to it. He could have concentrated more on the CEO role than utilizing the position to give opinion about various social issues.

Tim cook style is to go to the root problem for solving issues. He talks of societal issues which ultimately has an impact on the company and its brands. His policy decisions are good. But he finds trouble in acting fast for resolution of product related issues. His style of decision making do have an impact on the company and puts this inclusive nature but he needs to focuses more on business side than on social issues.

Answer preview…………….

apa 247 words