Report details Tim Cook's changes at Apple, for better or worse

Enlarge / Apple CEO Tim Cook

Chris Foresman

Since taking over for former Apple CEO Steve Jobs last August, newly minted CEO Tim Cook has slowly made a number of changes to how things are done at the company. Whereas Jobs was mercurial, Cook is apparently genteel. Whereas Jobs downplayed labor issues in China, Cook has personally visited factory floors and met with Chinese officials.

Fortune editor Adam Lashinsky, who recently detailed Apple's inner workings in his book Inside Apple, is well suited to note such "subtle but significant changes." In a recently published report for Fortune, Lashinsky makes the case that Cook is leaving an indelible mark on Apple and its corporate culture.

Though Cook is maintaining "most" of Apple's corporate culture, largely implemented by Jobs since he took the helm in 1997, he is reportedly "taking action that Apple sorely needed and employees badly wanted." And while many of the changes seem positive, not everyone is so sure that those changes are necessarily for the better.

Here are a few examples from the report that caught our attention:

• Since taking over at Apple, the company's stock performance has been remarkably similar to its performance at the time Jobs took over in 1997. After three quarters, however, AAPL is up 42 percent, while after Jobs's first three quarters, it had only risen 21 percent. "By any quantitative measure, so far his performance is phenomenal," Bill Shope, a Goldman Sachs research analyst, told Fortune.
• A former vice president at Apple believes the company is becoming more "corporate" and "conservative," noting that the company resembles more of a "conservative execution engine" than an engineering-run organization. "I've been told that any meeting of significance is now always populated by project management and global-supply management," Max Paley, a 14-year Apple veteran who left in 2011, told Fortune. "When I was there, engineering decided what we wanted, and it was the job of product management and supply management to go get it."
• Apple employees are known for their dedication, passion, and long work hours. But the "90 hours a week and loving it" attitude seems to be relaxing under Cook. One former Apple employee described meeting a current engineer for lunch and expecting his former co-worker to rush back to work after eating. Instead, he offered to take time to have a coffee."The outsider's conclusion: 'I think people are breathing now.' It's not necessarily a compliment," Lashinsky wrote.
• Unlike Jobs, who preferred to eat with design chief Jony Ive, Cook reportedly tends to sit down at the Apple corporate cafeteria and eat with various workers. "It is a small difference that speaks volumes about how employees can expect to interact with their CEO," Lashinsky wrote. "Cook clearly is a demanding boss, but he's not scary. He's well-respected, but not worshiped."

The whole report is worth a read, so check it out when you have a chance.

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