Tim Cook gave a commencement speech this year at MIT. Let’s look at the transcript:
in a moment of youthful indiscretion, I might even have experimented with a Windows PC, and obviously that didn’t work.
I would have laughed about this six months ago. Now that I own a $2,400 Dell XPS 13 2-in-1, I am crying.
I had never met a leader with such passion
The person who gets paid to lead says that it is all about the great leader and the passion. And that probably you should find a passionate leader and follow him or her. It worked for the Germans in the 1930s (well, until roughly 1943 anyway). Why not for MIT grads?
Aligned with a leader who believed that technology which didn’t exist yet could reinvent tomorrow’s world.
He’ll just have to agree to disagree with Bill Burr.
So the question I hope you will carry forward from here is how will you serve humanity?
Should we burden 22-year-olds with this standard? Shouldn’t this be reserved for the Albert Schweitzers? (Or are we interpreting “serve humanity” as in this Turkish Airlines commercial?)
Technology today is integral to almost all aspects of our lives and most of the time it’s a force for good.
Because video games enable Americans to enjoy their SSDI and Oxy? Wouldn’t most people actually be better off if they didn’t have an iPhone that encouraged them to waste time with Farmville, Facebook, and celebrity news?
I’m not worried about artificial intelligence giving computers the ability to think like humans. I’m more concerned about people thinking like computers without values or compassion, without concern for consequences.
Like Owen Wilson in Wedding Crashers, telling women “You know how they say we only use 10 percent of our brains? I think we only use 10 percent of our hearts.”?
Whatever you do in your life, and whatever we do at Apple, we must infuse it with the humanity that each of us is born with.
What if “humanity” for some Apple customers means waging Jihad? Why is humanity-infused automatically better than plain technology?
Don’t listen to trolls
Where “troll” = “anyone who didn’t vote for Hillary”? Or “troll” = “anyone who disagrees with you”?
At a shareholders meeting a few years back, someone questioned Apple’s investment and focus on the environment. … So I told him, “If you can’t accept our position [of wasting shareholder money on unprofitable green initiatives], you shouldn’t own Apple stock.”
Tim Cook is not afraid to speak truth to power!
[Separately, in what sense is Apple “green”? They are headquartered in a place that is accessible only by car, right? So wouldn’t they be automatically less green than a typical Manhattan-based Fortune 500? They compound this problem by being headquartered in a place where real estate is crazy expensive, which causes at least some workers to settle 30-90 miles away. They further compound this problem by being headquartered in a place with some of the worst traffic jams on the planet, which causes commute times and gasoline consumption to be yet more extreme.]
When you are convinced that your cause is right, have the courage to take a stand.
What kind of courage is required when you’re at the head of a trillion-dollar company?
if you choose to live your lives at that intersection between technology and the people it serves, … then today all of humanity has good cause for hope.
Uh oh, bad news for humanity every time someone decides to major in science rather than engineering. In fairness to Cook, though, when was the last time that you used a Higgs boson to get to the next level in an iPhone game?
Readers: did you find anything non-generic in the transcript? To me the speech seems like something almost anyone could have given. Why not share with MITers some secrets of effective management? Tim Cook must know something that makes him worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Apple shareholders (or at least they pay him that much!). Why not try to share that?
Related:
- What do liberal arts college graduates want to hear? (Jessye Norman at Oberlin)
He doesn’t really sound very intelligent, does he? Or maybe the right word is thoughtful. So I think one would need to conclude, at least based on this, that he probably isn’t. Like the people who run many of America’s large corporations he probably got where he is through a large dose of luck — so he doesn’t have any secrets to share. Except, perhaps, try to be lucky. But who would want to hear that?
As former COO he needs to disguise the fact that the way he optimized Apple operations was outsourcing manufacturing to foxcon, not very encouraging for some newly minted engineers at MIT.
Do these colleges ever have right-wing speakers urging the students to take a stand for a cause?
Roger: That would be awesome! I would love to see a video of a Catholic speaking to a liberal arts college commencement telling the young graduates about her work against abortion, divorce, and artificial contraception. Or perhaps an immigrant from Eastern Europe talking about taking a stand against Big Government, high taxes, central planning, etc. Or, maybe best of all, a Mormon sharing about the rewards of devoting one’s life to campaigning for abstention from alcohol and premarital sex.
Chess master Garry Kasparov of Baku, Azerbaijan, USSR (and anti-Putin activist) made a commencement address in 2015:
https://www.facebook.com/GKKasparov/posts/10153347751533307:0
Kasparov has always struck me as pretty obviously on the CIA payroll.
Solzhenitsyn gave a commencement address to Harvard and freaked out both the Soviet Union and the USG establishment. Which is about where you want to be.
“Readers: did you find anything non-generic in the transcript? To me the speech seems like something almost anyone could have given. ”
The point of having Tim Cook deliver that speech is not that only Tim Cook can deliver such a speech(consisting mostly of platitudes it seems, most likely written by an assistant?). Instead, the main reason of having Tim Cook there is probably to reaffirm MIT’s status as an elite institution(It’s unlikely Tim Cook would have delivered such a speech at a community college), and also perhaps to give the graduates and their families some photo(selfie?) ops.
” Why not share with MITers some secrets of effective management? Tim Cook must know something that makes him worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Apple shareholders (or at least they pay him that much!). Why not try to share that?”
While a speaking engagement at MIT probably confers some measure of elite status on Tim Cook, it might not be wise for him to actually share his management knowledge and skills(whatever those might be) with some graduates who can potentially turn into competitors for his job, likely at much lower compensation.
At the end of the speech, was there a Q&A session? Is there some mechanism for MIT(and other similar institutions) to provide feedback to all speakers and speech-writers, so that future speeches can be improved, and relevant issues addressed?
If I had a chance to ask a question, I would ask Mr. Cook what, if any, measures can be(or has been) taken to make Apple’s devices easier and cheaper to recycle, and the precious/toxic metals inside the devices cheaper and easier to extract. That would definitely help make Apple more “green”.
VP Mike Pence get the commencement at Notre Dame, and there was a protest. Why does anyone protest Tim Cook?
> Should we burden 22-year-olds with this standard? Shouldn’t this be reserved for the Albert Schweitzers? (Or are we interpreting “serve humanity” as in this Turkish Airlines commercial?)
Perhaps he means in the sense of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man
Their new headquarters *is* shaped rather like a flying saucer …
bobbybobbob,
Kasparov is independently wealthy having made few millions when they were a lot of money. He is really this way, and always was.
> Kasparov is independently wealthy
Well so are Mark Zuckerberg and Ted Turner. It’s not always so simple as initiative.
Kasparov first made his money by being best in chess, against both Soviet favorite Karpov and anyone else, nobody advanced his websites or news networks. He voiced his opinions in adversary conditions and had been attacked physically, no comparison to two famous American businessmen.