TIMES Person Of The Year Runner-Up: Tim Cook

Tim Cook has the decidedly nontrivial distinction of being the first CEO of Apple since the very first to come to power without blood on his hands. For most of its history, Apple has had a succession problem: it had no internal mechanism for transferring power from one CEO to the next without descending into civil war in between. “Each time,” Cook says, “the way that the CEO was named was when somebody got fired and a new one came in.”

This clearly bothered Steve Jobs, because he spoke to Cook about it shortly before he died. “Steve wanted the CEO transition to be professional,” Cook says. “That was his top thing when he decided to become chairman. I had every reason to believe, and I think he thought, that that was going to be in a long time.” As we now know, it wasn’t.

As long as he was handpicking his successor, you’d think Jobs would have chosen someone in his own image, but he and Cook, who was Jobs’ COO at Apple, are in a lot of ways diametrical opposites. Jobs was loud, brash, unpredictable, uninhibited and very often unshaven. Cook isn’t. He doesn’t look like the CEO of Apple, he looks more like an Apple product: quiet, tidy, carefully curated, meticulously tooled and at the same time strangely warm and inviting. He doesn’t look like Jobs, he looks like something Jobs would have made. Cook’s flawless cap of white hair could have been designed by Jony Ive and fabricated in China out of brushed aluminium.

Cook does have a few things in common with Jobs. He’s a workaholic, and not of the recovering kind. He wakes up at 3:45 every morning (“Yes, every morning”), does e-mail for an hour, stealing a march on those lazy East Coasters three time zones ahead of him, then goes to the gym, then Starbucks (for more e-mail), then work. “The thing about it is, when you love what you do, you don’t really think of it as work. It’s what you do. And that’s the good fortune of where I find myself.”

Like Jobs, Cook suffers fools neither gladly nor in any other way (except when he has to, i.e., when talking to journalists). Behind the scenes, that measured calm can — if the legends are true — become a merciless coldness that roots out confusion and incompetence. “I’ve always felt that a part of leadership is conveying a sense of urgency in dealing with key issues,” he says. “Apple operates at an extreme pace, and my experience has been that key issues rarely get smaller on their own.” The definitive Tim Cook anecdote involves a meeting he once called about a crisis in China that required a hands-on solution. After 30 minutes, he looked at one executive and said, “Why are you still here?” The man — a sense of urgency having been successfully conveyed — immediately left the meeting, drove directly to the airport and flew to China, without even a change of clothes.

Almost immediately after he arrived at Compaq, Cook began to get calls from Apple’s headhunters. Jobs was back from exile — he was pushed out from Apple in 1985, then rehired 12 years later — and he wanted to bring in somebody new to run operations. At that point Apple was generally considered to be in a death spiral — that year alone, it lost a billion dollars — and Cook had no interest whatsoever in moving. But Jobs was a legend in the industry, so Cook sat down with him one Saturday morning in Palo Alto. “I was curious to meet him,” Cook says. “We started to talk, and, I swear, five minutes into the conversation I’m thinking, I want to do this. And it was a very bizarre thing, because I literally would have placed the odds on that near zero, probably at zero.”

Cook was interested in Jobs’ strategy, which he describes using a favorite Cook expression, doubling down: “It was the polar opposite of everyone else’s. He was doubling down on consumer when everybody else was going into enterprise. And I thought it was genius. Compaq was doing so poorly in consumer, didn’t have a clue how to do consumer. IBM had left. Everybody was kind of concluding that consumer business is a loser, and here Steve is betting the company on it.”

It wasn’t just what they were doing at Apple, it was how they were doing it. The culture was different. “I loved the fact that I could disagree with Steve and he wasn’t offended by it.” For his part, Jobs must have seen something in Cook that wasn’t obvious to anybody else: the maverick, the outsider. “I’ve never thought going the way of the herd was a particularly good strategy,” Cook says. “You can be assured to be at best middle of the pack if you do that. And that’s at best.”

Cook got home on Sunday. Jobs offered him the job on Monday. On Tuesday, Cook resigned from Compaq. The same way Ive became Jobs’ trusted lieutenant on the design side, Cook stepped into that role in the less sexy and consumer-facing but equally vital area of manufacturing and distribution.

As COO, Cook was content to be a wizard in the dark art of supply-chain management. As CEO, Cook has had to decloak, to focus on the very public product side, the way Jobs did. When Cook looks back at 2012, that’s where he puts the emphasis. “It’s the most prolific year of innovation ever,” he says. “If you went back and were to watch a compressed movie of it, it’s amazing the products that have come out.”