If pressed, Cook will disagree, politely, with the portrait painted by some that he is a spreadsheet guy, a suit running a company built by a man who disdained suits. “Steve saw this—one of the things I loved about him was he didn’t expect innovation out of just one group in the company or creativity out of one group,” Cook says. “He expected it everywhere in the company.” Including in operations, where Cook worked: “When we were running operations, we tried to be innovative in operations and creative in operations, just like we were creative elsewhere. We fundamentally had to be in order to build the products that we were designing.”
Zach Baron in Tim Cook on Shaping the Future of Apple