Tim Cook Says Steve Jobs Told Him to Ignore the Question «What Would Steve Do?»
Before handing over Apple's CEO role, Steve Jobs gave Tim Cook advice shaped by Disney's own succession struggles: don't try to imitate a founder, just do what is right. Cook says the guidance freed him to lead as his best self, and the company's collaboration culture remains central.
When Steve Jobs handed Tim Cook the chief executive role at Apple, he offered a piece of advice meant to prevent the company from getting stuck in the past. According to Cook, Jobs told him: «Never ask what I would do, just do the right thing.» The guidance, which Cook recounted in a CBS Sunday Morning interview earlier this year, was designed to spare his successor the burden of trying to imitate a founder whose shadow loomed over the entire company.
Cook explained that Jobs had seen the problem play out elsewhere. During his years working with Disney — Jobs was also a cofounder of Pixar Animation Studios, which Disney acquired in 2006 — he watched the entertainment giant struggle with a kind of paralysis, endlessly debating what its own founder, Walt Disney, would have done. Jobs did not want Apple to fall into the same trap. At the time, Apple had never gone through what Cook described as a «professional transition» at the CEO level; previous successions had taken place in moments of «panic.» Jobs wanted this one handled differently, so he invited Cook to his house and offered him the job without any expectation that he would mimic his leadership style.
«I'll never forget that and it was such a gift for me, because he took off of my shoulder this question of, ‘What would Steve do?'» Cook said. «I just put my head down and thought, ‘I'm going to be the best version of myself.'» The advice did not mean abandoning the principles Jobs built into Apple. Cook said the company's culture of collaboration — the idea that one plus one equals three, not two, and that sharing and debating an idea makes it bigger and better — dates back to the company's origins. He described a workplace where caring enough to call a colleague at 10 at night with a new idea can produce remarkable results, and where meetings are built around arguing and debating everything.
Cook also pointed to Jobs's discipline of focus: saying «no» to a thousand things in order to say «yes» to the one that truly matters, and insisting that good is not good enough — work has to be «insanely great.» Cook joined Apple in 1998 after stints at Compaq and IBM, less than a year after Jobs returned as interim CEO. He rose to chief operating officer in 2005 and worked under Jobs until Jobs's death in October 2011. At the start of September this year, Cook stepped down from the CEO role, and John Ternus took his place.
Jobs's advice to Cook fits a pattern of blunt guidance he gave other business leaders. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, said on Lenny's Podcast in 2024 that Jobs helped him overcome «entrepreneur's block» by telling him to grow his business tenfold in two years, land a big customer for the Salesforce automation product, and build an application economy. Benioff interpreted the last point as a push toward an app store, creating AppExchange and later giving Apple the App Store trademark and the domain in return for Jobs's help. Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz also received tough love: in 2008, with the coffee chain in crisis, Jobs advised him to fire his entire leadership team because they would all be gone within nine months anyway. Schultz found the idea preposterous at the time, but later said Jobs was right — every member of that team left except one.
For younger workers, Jobs's message was simpler. In his 2005 Stanford University commencement speech, he said the only way to be truly satisfied is to do work you believe is great, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. «If you haven't found it yet, keep looking — and don't settle,» he said. That lesson, Cook suggested, remains part of the DNA Jobs left behind at Apple, even as the company's current leadership is expected to chart its own course.
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