Meeting Apple COO Jeff Williams

Apple has always been one of the companies I admire. I remember waiting for my computer class in second grade just to use the iMacs that my school had bought. Although I had no familiarity with computers it was so easy to use and made me feel special because I was able to use the same machine grown-ups were using to work. I still remember receiving my first iPod and running over to my neighbor's house to have it set up since I did not know what an iTunes account was. Fast forwarding to today, I used my MacBook and iPhone to write this article. It's fair to say that I grew up with Apple and saw them blossom into one of the most innovative companies of the high tech industry capable of redefining the world as we know it right before our eyes.

When I learned that Apple’s Chief Operating Officer, Jeff Williams, was going to speak at Elon University I couldn’t pass up on the opportunity. Information about Apple’s top executives seems to be classified and most have been described through stories that sound like myths which highlight how special the company culture and its workers are. Apple’s management and its employees are focused on putting every effort they have into making great products and services and spend no time bragging about accomplishments and success. In general, as Mr. Williams explained in his opening statement, Apple keeps its messaging very controlled so that it can project what is really important about its brand and its values. The same can be said about its COO. From my research before our meeting, after reading his Wikipedia entry, bio on Apple’s website and a few articles about his work, I learned that he graduated from North Carolina State in mechanical engineering, earned his MBA at Duke and went on to work for IBM before joining Apple in 1998. I drove to Elon eager to learn more.

In this article I’d like to provide chunks and stories from the Q&A that highlight and capture what makes Mr. Williams and Apple successful in what they do as well as share insight and advice that the executive had for students that are thinking about where to start their professional career and are not quite sure what might be the right path to take. This will include stories about: his first meeting with Steve Jobs and joining the company, how the Apple Watch has saved lives, the COO’s response to analysts that claim some products are overpriced, how to create and maintain an innovative work environment as well as career advice.

• Mr. Williams' path from graduation to becoming Apple’s Chief Operating Officer.

I am a North Carolina native and I went to school at NC State starting as a chemical engineer and graduating as a mechanical engineer. I wasn’t sure of what I wanted to do coming out of school and I had fallen in love with a girl who had one more year of college so we ended up getting married and I ended up taking a job at IBM where I spent 13 years. At IBM I had 13 different jobs in 13 years starting off on a manufacturing line doing quality. Although they claimed it was an executive grooming program I’m convinced they were just throwing me around to anyone who could put up with me.

When my wife and I had our 3rd child we had decided to take a break for a while. I had a fire in my belly to do something different and I was going to take a job with Dell Computer which at that time was on top of the world so I went to Austin excited about the possibility. Shortly after, out of courtesy to somebody I had worked with at IBM, Tim Cook, who had called and asked me to come over to Apple, I decided to visit the company but told him there was a 0% probability that I was going to join Apple. I flew to Silicon Valley and spent the day with Steve Jobs, who had just come back as interim CEO, and several other people. At the end of the day, I remember calling my wife and saying “Instead of Austin, what do you think about joining Apple?” She asked me if I thought they’d do well and I remember thinking “Of course not, they’ll be belly up in 2 years” but there was this contagious enthusiasm that was so palpable and was something I really wanted to be a part of.

One of the reasons I didn’t think the company would do well came from a discussion with Steve. Apple had just lost 1 billion dollars and was almost bankrupt so I asked him: “What’s your revenue growth plan?” I remember he said: “We’re going to be the Sony of the PC industry.” At the time, Sony made these very wonderful products that were great for consumers. He then said: “We’re going to bring fashion to computers”. Computers were ugly beige boxes in those days. The last thing he said was: “We’re going after the consumer.”

In business, there is a consumer marketplace, where you sell to individuals, and then there is a corporate marketplace, where businesses buy things. All the money was in the B2B segment at the time so I thought that this was the dumbest strategy I had ever heard. I guess you could say [Jobs] may have been right.

I ended up joining the company and to this day it’s one of the few right brain decisions I’ve ever made other than choosing my wife. They both ended up being the best decisions I’ve ever made so for those of you who are not sure what to choose, although I don’t like to impart a lot of advice, sometimes listen to your gut. 100% of people told me at that time that I was making a mistake. Dell was on fire and literally, we had to borrow money when I joined just to make payroll. When I moved from North Carolina to California, housing prices were so high I had to borrow money from Apple just to put a down payment and live out there. I would carry an air mattress into a conference room on a Tuesday morning and leave on Thursday as we were trying to put things together but in retrospect, it has been this amazing journey.

• Becoming Chief Operating Officer.

About becoming COO, I never really thought of a path, in fact, it's not something I sought or care about in terms of title. At Apple, there is such a focus on doing amazing work that people pay a lot less attention to other stuff but the short story is I kept doing more and more interesting things and one thing lead to another so that when Tim, the COO at the time, became CEO, I was chosen to replace him.

As COO I do a lot of interesting things given that the company is constantly changing. In addition to all the operations, I spend a lot of time working on the Apple Watch and have threaded it into health. 5 years ago I would have thought that was crazy but today that is where I spend most of my time because we see such an opportunity in this space and feel a moral responsibility to make an impact in such a critical area.

• How to create and maintain an innovative and creative culture.

One of the things that Steve said is that “When you see excellence you’ll know it. It’s a hard thing to teach”. What I can tell you is to look for those flashes of excellence, recognize them. A perfect example is when I took over the watch effort.

We were close to announcing the Apple watch and were working on the marketing materials. Because it’s a personal device that you wear and it's fashion, we knew we needed something different in the advertising so we hired a few people from the fashion space and were told that there was this one photographer who was really creative and who they thought was the best. I looked at the price for his time and was reluctant to take him on but in some moment of weakness I accepted and decided to have him join us. This person came down and shot pictures of the models without the watch since nobody could see the watch before release, and I started hearing that the shoot was crazy and the photographer's attention to detail was just as scrupulous as we were with our products.

When the first set of photos came back, as I opened them up, I saw in every page that you knew you wanted to be that person wearing that watch. I could tell that was excellence and it made me want to up my own game. Seek excellence, recognize it and feed off it.

• What he worries about the most.

The number one thing I worry about is us as a company. We’ve grown so much and the key is never getting complacent. The people that join today, all they know is that Apple is on top. So whenever I get the chance I inject as much uncertainty I can. I wake up every day knowing that we are only one hit away from irrelevancy and complacency is the worst thing for a company. My biggest worry is keeping that sense of hungry startup ready to go. Security is humans' greatest weakness. It’s always good to take a moment, reflect, be proud of what you do but then assume the competition is going to eat your lunch and run like crazy.

• Apple's organizational structure.

We’re the bumblebee that is not supposed to be able to fly. When the scientists look at the bumblebee and do all the math of aeronautics they believe it is impossible that it can fly yet it does. In the business world, you can set up a company as functional or divisional.

When you set it up as functional, you have people who do certain jobs like a marketing group, finance group, design group, production group, and they all come together. There is someone who then makes the decision. When companies start they are small and functional. As they grow they get to be so big that they have to make divisions so that each division has all of those functions, otherwise each decision has to go so far up and down that the company stifles.

For many years, all the analysts have been saying that we could no longer run as a functional company. We haven’t yet become divisional and part of that is this intense desire to stay humble and nimble and drive and make decisions quickly. Every Monday morning we meet for several hours among the executive team and we go through everything, rapid fire. We challenge each other, debate each other, make decisions and try to make most of them right but make sure not to stall in analysis paralysis.

• How it feels to see so many people with Apple products and what he thinks about luck.

The excitement comes when people are using the products and it's enriching their lives. I feel fortunate to be a part of this and consider myself very lucky. For that matter, I would like to briefly digress on luck. I have two versions of luck that I talk about.

If I’m talking to somebody young just getting started I have a version of luck that is something like “The harder I work the luckier I get” or “Luck is when preparedness meets opportunity”.

For somebody who has had some great success, I have another view. I have this view of simply being fortunate. Too many people that are very successful, I find, end up believing the narrative about them. I call it breathing their own exhaust and I don’t have a lot of tolerance but see it pervasively throughout places in Silicon Valley. People start thinking they get it all. The reality is we are all the benefactors of all the great people that came before us and all the lucky situations and it's never lost on me, every day, when I wake up, that there are a tons of people all over the world that are smarter than me, work harder than me but for their set of circumstances have not had the success I have had but would have done a way better job in my place. When I look at people carrying our products I think it's really great that I got to be a part of something so exciting.

• His greatest watershed moment, breakthrough or accomplishment at Apple.

There have been so many that it is hard to pick one. I could tell you about the work we’re doing in health. Our goal was to make people more active with the Apple Watch knowing that if doctors could write one prescription for the world, if they could pick one thing, they would in most cases encourage activity. Its impact on health is huge. For this reason we launched the activity rings on the device to track users physical activity to encourage people to be more active.

Once we launched the product we started receiving letters from customers that came in two forms: those who felt like Apple Watch had changed their lives and those who said that the Apple Watch had saved their life. Initially, I thought it was simply people searching for publicity. Although the watch had a heart rate monitor, we did not think this could be lifesaving given that any person with a watch can measure their own heart rate and the monitor had actually been put on the watch to accurately measure activity and caloric expenditure. But we kept receiving more and more letters including ones from cardiologists. We realized that just because people can measure their own heart rate doesn’t mean they will and there is great value in taking care of people in the background.

Here is an example of a letter:

“My name is Heather and I recently purchased my Apple Watch series 3 about a month ago. It’s been amazing. I knew the watch was great but had no idea it would save my life. My husband and I were sitting and watching tv one evening when my watch notified me that my resting heart rate was too high. I’d never had any medical issues before so I continued to watch my heart rate. The next day it still notified me that it was too high, without my watch I would have never known the difference. I went to urgent care to get checked out and they sent me to the emergency room because they weren’t sure of what was going on. After running some tests they diagnosed me with thyroid storm and sent me to the ICU. I was just discharged from the hospital yesterday and am now back at home with my husband, toddler and four-month-old baby while I continue treatment. The mortality rate for untreated thyroid storm is 75% but if you can detect it early your chances of survival increase. Without my Apple watch, I don’t know if I’d be sitting here with my family today. Thank you for making the product you do, I’ll never be without my watch.

• About Apple’s products being overpriced.

The stories that come out about the cost of our products have been the bane of my existence from the beginning of time, including our early days when assumptions were made about how much it cost to produce the iPod. There would be a report that would come out saying “This is being produced for $40” and Steve used to forward those reports to me. At some point, I thought we should hire the analyst to show us how to produce the product for that cost. The reality is the costs [in those articles] are not true. I wish they were. Analysts cannot fully understand the cost of what we do and how much care we put into making our products.

We offer a full range of products and prices and its something we’re very aware of. We do not want to be an elitist company, we want to be an egalitarian company and we have a lot of work going on in developing markets to try to help increase our penetration there.

• The best way to approach the working world out of college.

I think it's an individual decision and depends on what you want. What I would say is to pick something, don’t focus on it being perfect and move forward. I say this because I hear a lot of people looking for the perfect ultimate job. I see a lot of people, especially in Silicon Valley, sitting around Starbucks waiting to build the zillion dollar startup. I find the key to be: doing something and moving forward. I don’t believe any of us really knows exactly where the path will take us.

In Steve’s famous graduation speech, he said: “You can only connect the dots looking backward” so instead of spending too much time on what the final dot is and how to get there focus on starting. You can spend time at a start-up company and learn a ton or learn a lot at a big company but pick something and move forward.

Whatever you do, do it as if you own it. Do the best you can, learn from that and move on. I never set out to be COO of Apple and I couldn’t have predicted that. I never could have predicted spending time with cardiologists working on the Apple Watch after graduating in mechanical engineering and taking a job at IBM on a manufacturing line doing quality. They key is pick something, if possible, that leaves the most doors open, where you learn the most and don’t worry about climbing up. Worry about learning and following whatever threads come your way.

Key takeaways:

1. Follow your gut and find something you really want to be a part of.
2. Do not focus on the job title, focus on the work you are doing.
3. Seek excellence, recognize it and feed off it.
4. "Security is mortals' chiefest enemy." Never become complacent.
5. A functional structure allows Apple to stay humble, nimble and make decisions quickly.
6. Value comes from doing something that enriches someone's life.
7. We are all the benefactors of the great people that came before us and all the lucky situations we've been part of.
8. Determining the exact costs and efforts of a business is not easy and this must be kept in mind when reading analysts' reports.
9. You can only connect the dots looking backward. Pick something, don’t focus on it being perfect and move on.
10. Whatever you do, do it as if you own it. Do the best you can, learn from it and move forward.