Tim Cook’s Farewell Letter Just Revealed His Most Important Leadership Habit

Tim Cook has been CEO at Apple for 15 years. The company has grown in extraordinary ways over that time. It spent much of that time as the most valuable company in the world, and was the first to reach $1 trillion and $3 trillion in market cap. There are, no doubt, countless lessons a leader could learn from Cook’s leadership at Apple, but the one that sticks out the most isn’t about products or stock buybacks.

In an open letter published on Apple’s website, Tim Cook announced that he would step down as CEO later this year. In that letter, he shared that, every morning for 15 years, the CEO of the most valuable company in the world did something most executives would delegate by their second week on the job. He read his email.

I’m not talking about executive summaries or KPI dashboards. I mean, maybe he read those too, but his letter is very clear that he started every day reading notes sent directly from Apple customers around the world.

“For the past 15 years I’ve started just about every morning the same way,” Cook wrote. “I open my email and I read notes I received the day before from Apple’s users all over the world.” That is the most important sentence in the entire letter.

Cook will be remembered for the numbers. Apple’s market cap rose from roughly $350 billion when he took over in 2011 to more than $4 trillion today, a more than 1,000 percent increase. Revenue nearly quadrupled, from $108 billion to $416 billion. Services alone grew into a $100 billion business, the equivalent of a Fortune 50 company tucked inside Apple. Active devices crossed 2.5 billion. Apple Watch, AirPods, and Vision Pro all became new categories under his watch, and the company finished the multi-year transition to Apple Silicon.

Every tribute to his tenure will lead with those figures, but I think you can make the case that they are the wrong headline. The headline is his inbox.

Most CEOs, once they take the top job, stop hearing from customers. They hear about customers. Someone from the marketing team delivers a sentiment analysis, or the product team talks about NPS. By the time any of it reaches the corner office, the actual human voice on the other end has been flattened into a percentage. Cook’s strongest leadership trait might be that he refused to let that happen to him.