Tim Cook runner-up in Time Magazine’s Person of the Year 2012

Tim Cook has finished in the second runners-up spot for this years’ Time Magazine Person of the Year award. Time Magazine has announced that this year’s outright winner would be US President Barack Obama. Time then revealed its four runners-up and in order they were Malala Yousafzai, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi and Italian physicist Fabiola Gianotti, respectively. Cook was handpicked by the late Steve Jobs to take over his position at Apple back in 2011. Time Magazine says:

And like an Apple product, Cook runs smooth and fast. When Jobs died on Oct. 5, 2011, of pancreatic cancer, there were questions about whether Cook could lead Apple. Some, myself included, wondered whether Apple was even a viable company without Jobs. Since then Cook has gone about his business apparently unintimidated by his role as successor to one of the greatest innovators in history. Cook’s record hasn’t been flawless, but he has presided in a masterly way over both a thorough, systematic upgrading of each of the company’s major product lines and a run-up in the company’s financial fortunes that can only be described as historic.

The award is given every year by Time Magazine to recognise the people who have done the most to influence the events of that particular year. As a result of finishing as a runner-up, Tim Cook will appear on one of the covers of the Time Magazine “Person of the Year issue. Writer Lev Grossman has already written a detailed profile charting Tim Cook’s first full year as Apple’s CEO. The profile is well worth reading and includes some interesting insight into Cook’s daily working routines.

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.”

Source: Time Magazine

chrisoldroyd

UK editor at iMore, mobile technology lover and air conditioning design engineer.