Tim Cook on his role as CEO


The Washington Post as a great feature on Tim Cook. It's wide-ranging interview with some video segments. A section I like is how Cook views himself as CEO:

I think of a traditional CEO as being divorced from customers. A lot of consumer company CEOs -- they're not really interacting with consumers.

I also think that the traditional CEO believes his or her job is the profit and loss, is the revenue statement, the income and expense, the balance sheet. Those are important, but I don't think they're all that's important. There's an incredible responsibility to the employees of the company, to the communities and the countries that the company operates in, to people who assemble its products, to developers, to the whole ecosystem of the company. And so I have a maybe nontraditional view there. I get criticized for it some, I recognize. But I've never wanted to be the stereotypical CEO. I don't think I'd be very good at it, honestly. And I don't think for Apple that would in the long run be good for the company. If you care about long-term shareholder return, all of these other things are really critical.

Good stuff. Basically if leadership honors the company's values and cares about its employees and customers, the financials should take care of themselves. Unfortunately, the intense external focus on financials can make it hard for leadership to look past the next quarterly report, especially for companies as widely held as Apple.