Text size

You don’t have to be polite to get Tim Cook’s attention. Just have something smart to say.

The Apple (AAPL) CEO sat down with Fast Company for an interview that accompanied the magazine’s publication of a list of the world’s most innovative companies—which the Barron’s Next 50 component topped. (Several other components, such as No. 2 Netflix (NFLX), No. 3 Square (SQ), and No. 5 Amazon.com (AMZN), weren’t far behind.)

Here are some highlights from the Cook interview, lightly edited and condensed for flow:

• He hates Wall Street’s focus on quarterly results.

The truth is, it has little to no effect on us. But we are an outlier. More generally, if you look at America, the 90-day clock [measuring results by each fiscal quarter] is a negative. Why would you ever measure a business on 90 days when its investments are long term?

If I were king for a day, that whole thing would change. But when I really get down to it, here, it affects a few of us because we have to do a quarterly call and so forth, but does it affect the company? No.

• He doesn’t like the characterization that because other companies might launch product categories first, Apple is following their lead.

I wouldn’t say “follow.” I wouldn’t use that word because that implies we waited for somebody to see what they were doing. That’s actually not what’s happening. What’s happening if you look under the sheets, which we probably don’t let people do, is that we start projects years before they come out. You could take every one of our products—iPod, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch—they weren’t the first, but they were the first modern one, right?

In each case, if you look at when we started, I would guess that we started much before other people did, but we took our time to get it right. Because we don’t believe in using our customers as a laboratory.

• He takes some criticism with a huge grain of salt—and other criticism very seriously, notably when it comes from consumers.

We definitely listen. But because we know what’s happening inside the company, we just have to find another channel to listen to and tune out the noise.

Customers are jewels. Every day I read a fair number of customer comments, and they vary widely. Some are writing positive things about a store experience, an employee who did an incredible job for them. Some are saying, “Hey, I want a feature that’s not in the product right now.” Some are saying this feature should work this way, some are saying they had a life-changing experience with our product. I can no longer read all of them, but I read a bunch of them, because it’s sort of like checking our blood pressure.

I tend to weight the ones that are most thoughtful. That doesn’t mean polite—I don’t mind people saying I’m ugly or whatever. It’s just, what level of thought is it? I care deeply about what users think.

• Cook became Apple’s CEO in 2011. Questions about who might succeed him resurfaced recently, which Barron’s Next covered in a mid-February post.

Email David Marino-Nachison at david.marino-nachison@barrons.com. Follow him at @marinonachison.