Apple’s CEO has given excellent business advice since he took command

Apple watchers should make the time to read Fast Company’s extensive interview with Apple CEO, Tim Cook. It provides excellent insights into how Apple and its boss think.

Here are some of the highlights:

1. Apple is more interested in customer satisfaction than it is in stock price.
2. That focus on customer satisfaction also guides product development, sometimes it’s a challenge keeping the faith. Focus is important.
3. The company takes its time in product design, it doesn’t believe in using customers as a laboratory and works on core technologies “for years”.
4. Cook reads messages from customers every day. “I can no longer read all of them,” he says. He sees it as checking the company pulse.
5. Apple’s control of its own silicon gives it certain advantages, but it’s important to note that it needs to define what it needs from new silicon designs three or four years ahead of time.
6. Apple is serious about environmental, diversity and employee matters.
7. Cook seems to think the way the markets work – a focus on short-term profit and 90-day results — limits long-term innovation.
8. Cook still sees ARKit as “very profound, life-changing”.
9. When it comes to music, Apple sees it as a service its customers expect it to provide. “We’re not in it for the money,” Cook said. It’s about the company’s commitment to the creative community.
10. That commitment is also why the HomePod is a speaker system designed to do justice to the music.
11. Cook doesn’t go to the gym for fun. He also uses music to chill out at night.
12. Apple also tries to find ways to mitigate the potentially negative impact of tech
13. Apple listens to criticism, but because it knows what it is doing it also needs to filter out some of the noise.

One more thing

14. “We’ve got things we are working on now that are way out in the 2020’s.”

Now read the whole thing for better context.