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Sweet Home Alabama
Timothy Donald Cook was born on November 1, 1960, in Mobile, Alabama, a port city on the Gulf coast and the state’s third-biggest city. He was the second of three sons born to Don and Geraldine Cook. Both of his parents were rural Alabama natives. Don worked at the shipyard for Alabama Dry Dock and Shipbuilding, the largest employer in Mobile at the time, building and repairing military ships on Pinto Island. Geraldine worked part-time as a pharmacist and dedicated the rest of her time to the home.
Growing up, Cook had an excellent relationship with both of his parents, and he has remained deeply devoted to them. “He calls every Sunday, no matter what, no matter where he’s at,” Cook’s father told a television interviewer in 2009, two years before Cook assumed the role of CEO at Apple. “Europe, Asia, no matter where he’s at, he calls his mother every Sunday. He don’t miss a one.” Geraldine passed away at the age of seventy-seven in 2015, but Tim still maintains a close relationship with his father to this day.
At some point, the Cook family briefly moved from Mobile to Pensacola, Florida, about an hour’s drive away, where Don found work at a huge naval base. But in 1971, when Tim was in middle school, the family returned to Alabama, settling on East Silverhill Avenue in Robertsdale, a small rural town located smack in the middle of Baldwin County, the state’s largest county by area. Don and Geraldine chose to settle in Robertsdale so that their three sons could benefit from the top-notch public school system.
Robertsdale is the picture of small-town southern America. While technically a city, it has an area of only five square miles and a population today of barely more than five thousand, a tenth the size of Cupertino. When Cook was growing up, it had just half that number, about twenty-three hundred residents. Everyone knew everyone in town.
The city had sprung into quiet, laid-back life early in the twentieth century, thanks to its fertile farmland. Agriculture was its main source of income, though later the town would benefit from people passing through en route to the Gulf Shores beaches forty minutes away. When Cook was growing up, Robertsdale was a simple town that had no movie theater or bowling alley, where the most exciting event was the fall Baldwin County Fair. Geraldine described it, not unfondly, as “just a little hole in the ground.” The town has had the same mayor for the last thirty years.
The Cook family was religious, leading Tim to become religious himself. He has made references to his Christian belief throughout his career. “As a child, I was baptized in a Baptist church, and faith has always been an important part of my life,” he wrote in a 2015 editorial for the Washington Post . One can assume that this faith has contributed to his persona as a kind and generous leader. And when he announced he was gay in a Bloomberg editorial published in 2014, he referenced God, writing, “I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me.” Though Cook is not very outspoken about his religious beliefs these days, it’s clear they played a huge part in making him the man and leader he is today.
By all accounts, Cook appears to have fit well into Robertsdale life as a child. Contrary to the teenage tearaway Jobs sometimes portrayed himself as, Cook was a modest, high-achieving, straight-A student. Photos of him from the time depict a slightly gawky but athletic youth with a Donny Osmond haircut and a relaxed, open smile.
Cook excelled at subjects like algebra, geometry, and trigonometry—anything with an analytical edge. In all six years of middle and high school, he was voted the “most studious,” and in 1978 he earned the second-highest grades of his year, becoming salutatorian of his graduating class.
His former math teacher Barbara Davis recalled, “He was a reliable kid. He was always meticulous with his work, so I knew it would be done right.” Many colleagues and former bosses said the same thing: He could always be trusted to do a job well. And doing things right would become a hallmark of his career.
As well as being studious, Cook was social and well liked among his peers. “You didn’t go around calling him a nerd,” Davis said. “He was just the kind of person you liked to be around.” Many of his peers commented on his intelligence and warm personality, noting he had a playful side, too. Teresa Prochaska Huntsman, the one student who scored higher grades than Cook (and thus the class valedictorian), said of him, “He wasn’t one-dimensional. I didn’t know anybody who didn’t like him. He had a great personality.”
Another former classmate and friend, Clarissa Bradstock, said, “He was just really smart, bookish, and had a great sense of humor. We would just hang out. We’d watch Saturday Night Live . . . and just talk about school and everything.” She added, “It’s amazing that somebody from a small town in south Alabama can accomplish what he’s done. It’s a testament to our country . . . but it’s also a testament to him.” It’s clear that Cook’s high school friends are proud of what he’s achieved.
Cook was a stellar student, but he also excelled in extracurricular activities and showed glimpses of business acumen at an early age. He played the trombone in the school band, and was regularly called on to perform at school dances, football games, parades, and any other local event that required a live orchestra. To earn a bit of cash outside of school, he delivered copies of the Mobile paper, the Press-Register, got a job in a restaurant, and worked part-time at the local pharmacy, Lee Drugs, alongside his mother. The drugstore was in the Spaceway Shopping Center, Robertsdale’s only strip shopping center, on the main road through town. The drugstore is still there and seems to be thriving, unlike the rest of the strip, which features an assortment of forlorn-looking and shuttered stores. The healthiest businesses are a couple of lunch-counter spots and a tractor rental. Most of Robertsdale’s commerce has migrated out to the edge of town, where there’s an assortment of fast-food places, a couple of Dollar Generals and Family Dollars and a Walmart Supercenter, where Cook has occasionally been spotted picking up supplies, according to a resident I spoke with when I visited the town in June 2018.
At school, Cook also found time to work on the school yearbook, taking up the very appropriate role of business manager in his senior year. His job was to keep the books and pull in enough advertising to cover the costs for the production of the yearbook. A picture in the yearbook shows the entire production crew in matching sweatshirts (with Cook front and center laughing at something). The shirts are emblazoned with the phrase “Have you got yours?”—presumably a sales tactic encouraging students to buy a copy of the yearbook. That year, thanks to Cook’s efforts, the yearbook set new records in the numbers of books sold and ad dollars raised, according to a note in the yearbook itself. Barbara Davis described him as just “the kind of person you need” for a job like that. Working several jobs at once and acting as a business manager on a school project provided Cook with pivotal business experience at a young age, and laid the foundation for the relentless work ethic and sharp business head he was to develop later. Just as he had set new records with the yearbook, he would do the same at Apple many years later.
Other aspects of the yearbook foreshadowed his future at Apple. In one image from his junior yearbook, Cook appears alongside a classmate, showing off a pair of large headphones and an electric typewriter, exciting new technology at the time. The caption reads, “Teresa and Tim are using two of the modern ways to help study.” If only he could have known then that one day he’d be leading the biggest technology company ever created.
Though Robertsdale definitely has the genteel hospitality and old-school charm typical of southern towns, there’s also an unpleasant undercurrent of racism running through it. Cook’s experience of racism in Robertsdale had a significant impact on him, affecting his view of the world and his future emphasis on equality.
While Cook’s parents have claimed they moved from Pensacola to Robertsdale to get their kids into the best schools possible, the family’s relocation coincided with lots of similar moves at the time. Many white families, concerned about the increasing racial tensions in Pensacola as a result of the desegregation of its public schools, moved to nearby Alabama. Although Alabama’s public schools had already desegregated in 1963, racial tensions may have been more noticeable in the larger, more racially mixed Pensacola than in the smaller, overwhelmingly white Robertsdale (which is still 85 percent white today, according to the census).
“We had very few African Americans at the school,” said Cook’s classmate Clarissa Bradstock. “Baldwin County . . . was one of the richest counties at the time, because of oil. But the school we went to . . . was small. I didn’t witness any overt racism, but Alabama . . . was still working through a lot of those issues of segregation. I would hear people make racist jokes right in front of people who were African American. That was how it was at the time.”
In fact, a few years before the Cooks moved to Robertsdale, the town’s central shopping strip had a Piggly Wiggly grocery store that had separate drinking fountains. A Baldwin County resident, who asked to remain anonymous, described the overt racism that he witnessed in the area. “In 1966, my brother dated a young black woman on the sly but was spotted by whites at a café when he stopped to buy the girl a hamburger. She stayed in his car as a precaution. Soon after my brother [who was white] left the café, he was followed and flagged down by these same men in their pickup truck. They hauled him out and beat him badly, leaving him for dead in the nearby woods. . . . He ate soup through a straw for a week.” In Alabama at the time, racist acts like this were unfortunately not uncommon.
Cook had his own experiences with racism that would influence him for years to come. In the early 1970s, when he was in junior high, he was riding his new ten-speed bicycle at night along an isolated road outside Robertsdale when he noticed a fire by the side of the road. He pedaled closer and saw a burning cross, surrounded by Klansmen in white hoods and robes. While Ku Klux Klan membership had diminished from an all-time high of four million in 1925 to just a few thousand in the early 1970s, it was not uncommon to see Klan gatherings in some parts of the South at the time. The Klansmen Cook witnessed had assembled their flaming cross on the property of a local black family. Without thinking, Cook shouted, “Stop!” The Klansmen all looked at him, and one lifted his hood, revealing himself to be a local deacon at one of the churches in Robertsdale. He quickly warned Cook to keep on moving. It was a shocking experience for the young Cook.
He recalled this experience when receiving an IQLA Lifetime Achievement Award from Auburn University, his alma mater, in 2013. “This image was permanently imprinted in my brain and it would change my life forever,” he said. “For me, the cross burning was a symbol of ignorance, of hatred and a fear of anyone different than the majority. I could never understand it.” His experience encountering racism would affect the way the young Cook lived his life—and would eventually make it into his business practices.
But despite Cook’s insistence on the veracity of his story, there are some Robertsdale residents who take issue with his story about seeing members of the KKK burning crosses in the town. For example, Ted Pratt, a former schoolmate, said, “I have family and friends still in Robertsdale and no one can recall anything like that ever happening. . . . That story really ticked off . . . people who call Robertsdale their hometown.” Unsurprisingly, Robertsdale residents past and present do not want to be publicly associated with the Klan, and they are upset that their small town has been painted in such an ugly light by such a high-profile executive.
In a lengthy thread on a Facebook page called “Robertsdale Past and Present,” dozens of Robertsdale residents, current and former, questioned Cook’s memories. “Tim Cook is flat out lying about this incident,” wrote one commenter named Rod Jerkins. “Never happened.” (His comment got half a dozen “likes,” and was one of the most liked comments in the thread, showing general agreement with the sentiment.) In fact, there were no comments that I could find in defense of Cook. Among the 143 comments on the post, almost all of them questioned Cook’s memory. Another commenter, Marvin Johnson, added, “I asked relatives who have lived here much longer than I have[,] . . . more than half [a] century, and was told this incident never happened.” A third commenter wrote, “He flat out lied. Period.”
But it’s clear from the Facebook thread that many Robertsdale residents are in denial. Public posts on Facebook aren’t a good forum for admitting Klan activity, even if it took place decades ago. A couple of people who posted in the group said that while they didn’t see burning crosses, they did see burned-out crosses, and one recalled a burning cross displayed during a Christmas parade in a nearby town. The bitter truth is that Robertsdale likely had its fair share of Klan activity.
Representative Patricia Todd said that not only was the Klan active during Cook’s childhood, but it’s also still very much around today. “They’ve been distributing flyers in the last two years in various communities in Birmingham,” she said. “People can’t deny Alabama’s history around civil rights, which is not good . . . but racism is still alive and well in Alabama. . . . People don’t say it out loud, but there’s still a lot of people who really hate people who are different than them.”
Years after his experience with the Klan, Cook had another meaningful interaction with racism. When he was sixteen, he won an essay contest organized by a local utility, the Alabama Rural Electric Association. The topic was “Rural Electric Cooperatives—Challengers of Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow,” and Cook wrote his essay by hand; his family couldn’t afford a typewriter.
His prize was an all-expenses-paid trip to the nation’s capital, where he attended impressive banquets and got to hear President Jimmy Carter speak at the White House. But the trip was tainted by the fact that Cook also met Alabama governor George Wallace, a staunch segregationist who had, in vain, resisted the federal government’s attempts to integrate the state’s public schools during the 1960s. Cook shook Wallace’s hand, but later regretted it. “Meeting my governor was not an honor for me,” he said. “Shaking his hand felt like a betrayal of my own beliefs. It felt wrong, like I was selling a piece of my soul.” Luckily, he was able to learn from this experience—today, he has absolutely no tolerance for racism in any form, and though it’s still a work in progress, he has worked to make Apple a more inclusive place. Under his guidance, Apple has hired a greater proportion of minority workers than many of its Silicon Valley peers and given generous grants to historically black colleges and charities and foundations to encourage minority students to study STEM subjects.
Many of the values he has implemented at Apple seem to be a direct result of his childhood experiences with discrimination. In a 2013 talk to students at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business (where he earned his MBA), Cook talked about following the example of two of his heroes growing up: Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. “I was born and raised in the South and I saw, over the course of growing up, some of the worst behavior in terms of discrimination that literally would make me sick,” he told the students. He admires King and Kennedy because they risked their lives to fight discrimination. “That’s why I have three photos in my offices, two are of Kennedy, one is King,” he said. “That’s the only photos I have in my office. I look at them every day and . . . I think they’re incredible role models for all of us. . . . And that’s not a political statement, that’s just a statement about treating people fairly.”
The hatred and discrimination Cook witnessed during his childhood would stick with him throughout his life, influencing the way he acts in life and in business. Lisa Jackson, the first African American woman to head the Environmental Protection Agency, whom Cook hired to steer Apple’s environmental efforts in 2013, said Cook’s outlook on life was heavily influenced by his childhood experiences in the South. “It’s just part of who he is,” she said. “Being from the South, you’ve seen the ugliness but you’ve also seen the promise and the possibility,” she added. “At least I can’t divorce it from who I am, and Tim’s spoken about it.”
Cook has maintained his principles throughout his career, at Apple and elsewhere. In a 2015 commencement address at George Washington University, he expressed his belief that a person should not have to choose between “doing good and doing well.” His refusal to compromise his values has contributed directly to Apple’s success, though he’s been tested many times. In May 2014, a member of a conservative think tank, the National Center for Public Policy Research, pushed him to consider the impact sustainability programs were having on Apple’s bottom line. But he refused. “When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don’t consider the bloody ROI [return on investment],” he said. And the same thinking applies to Apple’s environmental initiatives, worker safety, and other policies. “If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock,” he snarled at the conservative investor. Afterward, the NCPPR issued a statement decrying Cook’s stance: “After today’s meeting, investors can be certain that Apple is wasting untold amounts of shareholder money to combat so-called climate change.” But Cook, as always, stayed true to his principles.
This moral compass, developed in his childhood, is one of the biggest differences between Jobs’s and Cook’s public personas. Jobs eschewed charitable donations, appeared to care very little about sustainability, and rarely spoke out about social issues. For him, the products he was willing into the world were contribution enough. A Macintosh with a gorgeous graphical user interface was more than enough to put a dent in the universe. Jobs believed that his work at Apple was more important to the world than any charitable contribution could be. For Cook, on the other hand, his contribution to society is more nuanced and complex. While he has always spoken with immense pride about the quality of Apple’s products, he has also been outspoken about using his position as CEO of the world’s most valuable company to make Apple a “force for good.” As we’ll see in later chapters, Cook has greatly increased Apple’s charitable giving, taken significant strides in making the company a major force in renewable energy and ensuring that its products are less toxic and more recyclable, attempted to render Apple’s supply chain safer and less exploitative, and made significant efforts to make Apple a more inclusive and diverse workplace.
His morality is rooted in a Christian upbringing, southern manners, and the teachings of his heroes Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. “I drew on the moral sense that I’d learned from my parents, and in church, and in my own heart, and that led me on my own journey of discovery,” he recalled in one speech. He drew on experiences from books as well. As a kid, he reportedly borrowed a copy of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird from the library in Robertsdale. Its depiction of good-hearted lawyer Atticus Finch’s righteous battle against racism in a fictitious Alabama town clearly resonated with him.
Cook’s support of marginalized minority groups was influenced too by his experience growing up gay in the South. He had never discussed this aspect of his life publicly, until talk show host Stephen Colbert asked him directly about it in a 2015 television interview: “That experience of growing up in Alabama as sort of a resident outsider because of your sexuality, did that inform in any way your trying to help people who are in hardship around the world?” Cook responded in the affirmative, explaining that he felt he needed to do something to counter widespread homophobia. “Kids were getting bullied in school, kids were getting basically discriminated against, and kids were getting disclaimed by their parents, and I needed to do something,” he said. “I felt a tremendous responsibility to do it.” This response offered a small, rare glimpse into the personal life of a very private man.
Others have echoed Colbert’s line of thinking when it comes to joining the dots on Cook’s own homosexuality and his willingness to speak out about progressive human rights issues. “I have to believe that growing up in Alabama during the 1960s and witnessing what he did, especially as someone who is gay, he understood the dangers of remaining silent,” said Kerry Kennedy, daughter of Robert F. Kennedy and a human rights activist herself. Now “he’s not afraid to stand up when he sees something wrong.”
Cook has not shared much about his experience as a young gay man, and by all accounts, it’s unlikely he came out in high school. His friend Clarissa Bradstock said she did not know he was gay at the time—and she even had a crush on him. She explains that their high school may not have been the most accepting environment. “There were some other people in the school that I thought at the time probably had a different orientation,” she said, “but you never said anything. They didn’t get harassed, but of course, they weren’t allowed to come out.”
“Robertsdale is not exactly a liberal bastion of the state,” said Representative Patricia Todd, the state’s only openly gay legislator. “If he did come out at a younger age, I would think it would [have been] very difficult.” This sentiment was echoed by a Baldwin County resident, who asked to remain anonymous: “Chances are that the locals would have shunned Tim if they had known he was gay. Stories abound of gays being ambushed and beaten, even by cops, who would tell a judge the victim ‘fell down the stairs.’” It’s no wonder that Cook chose not to make his sexuality public while he was living in Robertsdale.
But now many people are praising Cook for coming out, including Todd. She says it has empowered others to follow his lead and has normalized being gay. “I do think that makes a big difference, people like Tim and other openly gay CEOs,” she said. “I think it makes people realize how diverse our community is and that we truly are everywhere. Unlike other social movements on gender or race or ethnicity, we can hide. But now people are feeling empowered to come out. Tim’s been a part of that. . . . When the CEO of the most successful company comes out, people take notice.” This was exactly Cook’s intention. As he wrote in the Bloomberg “coming out” editorial, “If hearing that the CEO of Apple is gay can help someone struggling to come to terms with who he or she is, or bring comfort to anyone who feels alone, or inspire people to insist on their equality, then it’s worth the trade-off with my own privacy.”
Though many Robertsdale residents know of Cook’s achievements, these days he isn’t overtly celebrated in his hometown. Some of his old friends and classmates are openly proud of what he’s achieved, but there aren’t any plaques or trophies celebrating his accomplishments, old or new. A glass case in his old high school commemorates football star Joe Childress, an NFL running back who graduated in the 1950s, but there’s still nothing to be found about Cook. Perhaps it’s because he’s a businessman rather than an athlete. One current resident said most townsfolk wouldn’t know who Cook is, since they’re not concerned with global CEOs in their small Alabama town.
Among some who do know who Cook is, there’s a feeling that he has not done as much for the local economy as they believe he should have. On the “Robertsdale, Past and Present” Facebook page, there is a lengthy discussion of why he hasn’t used Apple to give back to the area. One poster asked why Robertsdale isn’t a tech center for Alabama, since it’s Cook’s hometown. This seems to be a commonly asked question.
Current resident Dillan Gosnay, twenty-one, said the town is struggling for jobs. He works the odd welding job when he can, but he’s essentially unemployed. And he’s not the only one. Like a lot of rural areas in America, Robertsdale has been struggling with unemployment for a long time. “The jobs, that is the worst part about living here. It’s hard, everybody has to work three jobs. . . . There’s nothing, there’s no big-name companies that make their headquarters here,” he said. “I think a lot of people wish that he would bring something and put it here for more jobs.”
But it will be awhile before Apple comes to town. Currently, Alabama doesn’t have explicit laws barring discrimination on the grounds of race, age, or sexuality. Shortly after Cook was inducted into the Alabama Academy of Honor in 2014, he personally told Representative Todd that Apple had no intention of investing in Alabama until the state passes antidiscrimination laws. “Citizens of Alabama can still be fired based on their sexual orientation,” Cook said. “We can’t change the past, but we can learn from it, and we can create a different future.”
Shortly after and inspired by Cook’s visit, Representative Todd introduced a nondiscrimination bill named after him in the Alabama state legislature. “Tim was honored to have it named after him,” she said. But unfortunately, it never became law. “Of course, it didn’t go anywhere,” she said. “I’m a Democrat and the legislature is controlled by Republicans. They have a supermajority. . . . They weren’t going to pass a nondiscrimination bill. It was more symbolic than anything. But . . . at least we got the conversation going.” It failed, but it was a step in the right direction.
And it’s clear that Cook isn’t indifferent to his hometown or home state. “He’s very interested in what goes on in Alabama,” Representative Todd said. “He keeps up with it. . . . He’s trying to help the state move forward. Which . . . considering it’s Alabama, is going to take a long time.” In December 2014, he donated an undisclosed but “sizeable” sum to the Human Rights Campaign, a Washington-based advocacy organization, which launched a three-year, $8.5 million campaign for gay rights in Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi. HRC’s “Project One America” is ongoing, with field offices and full-time staff members in all three states. Since Cook’s donation, HRC has grown to be the largest LGBTQ civil rights organization in the country, the group claims, with more than three million members and supporters. Cook also donated iPads to a very poor school system in Alabama’s “Black Belt,” an impoverished region named after its distinctive black dirt. “He has contributed, but he’s made it very clear to elected officials here, especially the legislature, ‘I’m not going to expand my operations in Alabama until you all pass nondiscrimination,’” Representative Todd said. “Of course, we’re not going to do that ’cause we’d rather, you know, thump our Bible than bring good jobs to Alabama.”
Cook has also inspired the local business community to speak up about nondiscrimination—with the current laws, and divisive efforts like bathroom bills, it’s difficult for them to recruit businesses to Alabama. “If you’d told me ten years ago that our biggest advocates for nondiscrimination were going to be the military and corporations, I would have laughed at you, but that’s what’s happening,” Representative Todd said. “It’s hard to recruit good employees and economic development when you’re seen as a state that’s backwards and allows discrimination.” Even though progress has been slow, Cook is hopeful that Alabama will change its laws—after all, the place is special to him. He returns regularly to watch Auburn football games and visit his family. He spent the first twenty-one years of his life there, and it clearly had an impact on him. As he once told a group of young people while visiting Birmingham, Alabama, “Most of my formative years were spent in Alabama.” Hopefully some of them will follow his lead and change Alabama for the better.
After graduating from high school in 1978, Cook left Robertsdale to attend Auburn University, where he pursued a bachelor of science degree in industrial engineering, one of his long-term goals. “Ever since he was in the seventh grade, he said, ‘I want to go to Auburn,’” his mother recalled. Auburn University was fairly close to Cook’s hometown—a mere three hours by car. Staying in Alabama was important to him. The other choice of university was the University of Alabama, in Tuscaloosa, but he felt it was too posh. “The well-to-do people went to Alabama,” he explained. “And it was sort of the place for the doctors and the lawyers, and I always associated myself with the working people. And the working people went to Auburn.”
His choice of industrial engineering at Auburn was astute. Former Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca, former Walmart CEO Mike Duke, and former United Parcel Service CEO Michael Eskew all had industrial engineering backgrounds, and earning this degree would put the young Cook on the same path. It suited his sensibilities and his skills: Industrial engineering focuses on ways to optimize complex systems, how best to eliminate wasted expenditure and make the best possible use of resources. This was a skill Cook developed early on. “He could cut through all the junk and get down to the gist of [a] problem very quickly,” said one of his professors, Robert Bulfin.
Cook’s career at Auburn was solid, if not spectacular. He was nominated an outstanding engineering graduate in his senior year and was incredibly humbled by the accolade. “I don’t deserve this,” he insisted at the time. “There are any number of people who deserve this more than me.”
Saeed Maghsoodloo, one of Cook’s college professors, remembered him as a “solid B-plus or A-minus student.” In an interview for the New York Times, published the year that Cook became Apple CEO, Maghsoodloo painted a picture of Cook as “a very quiet, unassuming individual [who was] very, very intense” and “sat quietly and studied.” But he was also personable and a good friend, as popular at university as he was in high school. Photos from the time show him laughing and joking with groups of his friends.
At Auburn, he would learn many of the skills that would help him throughout his career. He learned how to program. For one class, he created a system to improve the timing of traffic lights near the university. “I tried to optimize traffic because at that point in time stop lights were set on timers,” he explained. “I wanted to come up with a way to reduce the queues so people didn’t have to wait as long, whilst keeping the environment safe.” His system apparently worked so well that the local police adopted it. “That was pretty cool at the time—and it worked. Law enforcement implemented it,” he said. These days, though, he’s lost some of his coding ability. Now he jokes that his coding skills are “not bad,” but “there are many, many people in Apple who are better than I am.”
Auburn seems to have had a significant impact on Cook’s approach to work and his world outlook. The Auburn Creed, written in 1943 by the university’s first football coach, George Petrie, states, “I believe this is a practical world and that I can count only on what I earn. Therefore, I believe in work, hard work. I believe in education, which gives me the knowledge to work wisely and trains my mind and my hands to work skillfully. I believe in honesty and truthfulness, without which I cannot win the respect and confidence of my fellow men.”
In a commencement speech at Auburn in 2010, Cook echoed these words as a personal mantra. “Though the sentiment is a simple one, there’s tremendous dignity and wisdom in these words and they have stood the test of time,” he told the audience. “Those who try to achieve success without hard work ultimately deceive themselves, or worse, deceive others.” Cook certainly believed in hard work from a young age, and it is clear from the way he runs Apple that he values it in his employees as well.
At Auburn, Cook got his first true experience in corporate management. He enrolled in a cooperative education program, which meant he spent part of his time in college at Reynolds Aluminum in Richmond, Virginia. It turned out to be a crash course in the realities of the working world. Almost immediately, the firm was forced to make a large number of its employees redundant. Their loss, however, was Cook’s gain, as he was given the opportunity to fill in and help run the company alongside its president. The role of second in command was one that he would perfect over the following decades before rising to the top at Apple.
Cook graduated from Auburn in 1982, roughly eighteen months after Apple’s IPO and eighteen months before it released its breakthrough Macintosh. But Apple wasn’t on the twenty-one-year-old’s radar yet. When he graduated from college, a recruiter for IBM, the computing powerhouse that had just released its first IBM PC, approached him about a job. He also received offers from Andersen Consulting and General Electric, both attractive companies to work for. On making his decision to join IBM, Cook said, “The truth is, I’d never thought much about computers. Would things have turned out different if that hadn’t happened? I don’t know. But I do know that there are only a very few things in life that define you and that was one of them for me.” Despite his never having considered a job in the tech industry before—the industry was in its infancy and wasn’t likely high on many graduates’ lists—the IBM job was a good one, and Cook accepted it.
Immediately upon receiving his degree in electrical engineering, Cook joined IBM’s fast-growing PC operation, a relatively new division of the computing giant that operated out of a big assembly plant in Research Triangle Park in North Carolina. With the exception of the occasional trip to Auburn for football games, he never looked back.