Cook’s spirit is kindred to that of Immanuel Kant, the eighteenth-century German philosopher whose daily routine was so consistent that residents could set their watch to when he strolled by. His zeal for order is exactly what Apple operations needed. Compaq was a well-run business, but Apple was an absolute mess. Cook could make his mark immediately. Joe O’Sullivan, by then the acting head of operations, was tasked with teaching Cook the ropes. His goal was to distill his eleven years of experience into eight weeks of on-the-job training, beginning around April 1998. After just two weeks of on-the-job training, beginning around April 1998. After just two weeks, the two men agreed no more time was necessary. “By the time I left him, he knew more than I did about Apple,” O’Sullivan says. “That man has a fast mind. And a grasp. And a memory—honestly, it’s borderline photographic.”
Cook established exceedingly high expectations the first time he held an operations meeting of worldwide managers. In the weekly review, attendees went over what had gone wrong in the prior days, what needed to be fixed immediately, and what was coming up. These meetings were typically ninety minutes; sometimes they could stretch beyond two hours. On the day Cook took over, the weekly review went nearly thirteen hours. He insisted on a granular level of understanding and demanded fluency in the intricacies of every project. If a manager one week, in a lengthy presentation, projected that their team would ship 200,050 of something by Friday, Cook would remember. So the next week, if the manager said, “Yep, we met our numbers. We did two hundred thousand,” Cook would look at them and ask, with deadly seriousness: “And fifty?”
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