I will not write one line about Tim Cook – who just retired after fifteen years as chief executive officer of Apple – that has not been written before. He did what is usually impossible to do. He was successor to a founder, Steve Jobs, who was himself a legend and, if anything, outdid him. Under Cook’s leadership, the company’s market value increased tenfold and its revenue and profits quadrupled. He transformed Apple into what Matthew Lynn (in the Washington Post) aptly called “a colossus of global capitalism.”
Cook’s feat was not singular. But it was rare. It’s extremely unusual for the successor of a brilliant, colorful and charismatic founder to succeed on his own and ultimately to surpass his predecessor.
Cook moreover has been a second sort of pathbreaker. He has been a pioneer, a leader, in civil rights. In this case gay rights. He did not make a show of it, ever. But nor did he shy from claiming his identity. On the contrary, he made a point of doing so loudly and proudly when no other leader of a Fortune 500 company had ever done anything remotely similar.
In 2014, in an op ed for Bloomberg Businessweek, Cook wrote: “So let me be clear: I am proud to be gay, and I consider being gay among the greatest gifts that God has given me.” In 2015 Cook explained further. On The Late Show he told host Stephen Colbert that he “needed to do something” because kids like he “were getting bullied in school, kids were getting basically discriminated against, kids were even being disclaimed by their own parents.”
So, while my last post was about how unless bad leaders are stopped, they always get worse, this one makes a contrary claim. Seems to me that sometimes at least good leaders get better. And then better. And then better still. As Tim Cook did. Not just in one arena of American life but in two.