By Chip Cutter
How will John Ternus ever succeed Tim Cook's legacy at Apple?
No one knows that daunting challenge quite like Cook himself.
In his first months in 2011 as Apple's chief executive, Cook faced endless doubts. How, after all, could Apple keep the hit products coming without its visionary founder, Steve Jobs? Jobs loomed so large over Apple that one staffer owned a car with the vanity plate "WWSJD": What Would Steve Jobs Do?
Cook found a way to step out of Jobs's shadow by leaning in to his strengths as an operations guru and collaborator. He also made a series of moves early on that set the company on a new, even higher-performing course.
Some key strategies from the Cook playbook for following a business icon:
Make a distinct, crowd-pleasing imprint
One of the first signs Cook planned to operate differently came in 2012: Apple announced it would use some of its significant cash reserves -- then $100 billion -- to issue a dividend and buy back stock. It was a an enormous break from Jobs's philosophy.
Jobs had resisted calls to return cash to shareholders, preferring to use the stockpile to fund research, retail stores and growth. The last time Apple had paid a dividend was 1995, a year before the prodigal founder's return to the company.
Cook telegraphed the dividend plans at a conference, telling investors that Apple's board was discussing what to do with the cash. Many interpreted the move as a step toward more transparency with Wall Street.
"Steve Jobs did create a mystique, but also some misleading haze," said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a Yale School of Management professor and author of "The Hero's Farewell," on the challenges of CEO successions. "Cook was always transparent."
Share the spotlight
Keeping high-performing talent is a challenge for any new CEO. Cook proved adept at it -- even as he reshaped the board and its top ranks over time -- by sharing the spotlight with other Apple executives much more than his predecessor did.
Cook also brought on high-profile executives where needed: To revive its retail stores, Cook in 2013 hired Angela Ahrendts, the CEO of British luxury giant Burberry, signaling his willingness to embrace prominent deputies.
A common mistake CEOs make early on is, "it's going to be all about me," said Harry Kraemer, former CEO of healthcare company Baxter -- and now a professor of leadership at Northwestern University. Instead, Cook's model was: "Find out who the really good people are, and create an environment where everyone wants to work for me."
Keep the creatives happy
Cook, an industrial engineer, was known as the organized, details-obsessed operations mind when he took the helm. His challenge was ensuring Apple's creative spirit didn't disappear. He did this, in part, by delegating some product decisions. At least early on, he gave more authority over product development to Jony Ive, Apple's design czar and Jobs's protégé. (Ive left Apple in 2019 to form a new design firm.)
Cook also used Apple's success in selling hardware to boost profits by convincing consumers to buy related software and services.
Set a new management approach
The musician Bono once called Cook a "Zen master." He certainly managed differently than the more mercurial Jobs, setting a kinder, gentler tone. While Jobs could often be dismissive of ideas, Cook established a reputation for a more cautious, accessible and deliberate approach. Instead of rejecting a new idea outright, he was known to say: "Let's see what we can do with that."
That doesn't mean he was a softy. If Cook sensed people were unprepared in a meeting, he would sometimes say, "Next," then flip to the following item on a meeting agenda. The tactic left some in tears, The Wall Street Journal reported. Mostly, he tried not to be Jobs.
"I knew what I needed to do was not to mimic him," Cook told ESPN in 2017. "I would fail miserably at that, and I think this is largely the case for many people who take a baton from someone larger than life. You have to chart your own course. You have to be the best version of yourself."
Lean in to core principles
If Jobs felt Apple had an unwritten agreement with users to stay out of their lives and safeguard their information, Cook made privacy a centerpiece of his strategy.
"Key for a new leader is to decide what they need to put their emphasis on," said Hubert Joly, the former CEO of Best Buy.
When Joly co-leads workshops for incoming CEOs at Harvard Business School, he asks the executives to write their retirement speech a decade in the future. The exercise, he said, is clarifying, forcing leaders to articulate what they believe, and what they will set out to accomplish.
Cook, early on, staked out privacy as a key issue -- so much so that he is now known for it.
Identifying initial priorities is essential, Joly said, because new CEOs can be tested quickly. "There's going to be all sorts of curveballs thrown at you, sometimes faster than you hope," Joly said. "A true North Star is so essential."
Since Cook took on the job, Apple's share price has risen more than 1,900%, and its market value has climbed to $4 trillion.
News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, has a commercial agreement to supply news through Apple services.
Write to Chip Cutter at chip.cutter@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 22, 2026 18:23 ET (22:23 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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