Source: Fuqua Business School
by Bill Boulding
Dec 10, 2015
Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, speaks to students in Geneen Auditorium at the Fuqua School of Business as part of the school’s Distinguished Speaker Series
Tim was a student of mine when he came through our MBA program. Ironically, in my class we studied the famous 1984 Apple Super Bowl ad – and at the time, Tim was at IBM. He was fiercely loyal to IBM but he really loved that ad. Was that when the seed was planted?
In all seriousness, while it would be flattering to think that the MBA curriculum was the genesis of Tim becoming the authentic leader he is today, in reality much of Tim’s success lies in his ability to learn from a wide variety of people and the value he places in gaining insights from perspectives very different from his own. In fact, it is Tim who has taught me.
When I first stepped into the role of dean at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, I was confronted with a wide variety of challenges, competing interests and a slew of what I perceived as urgent priorities. Although I had held many leadership positions within the school, until I was in this job I couldn’t conceive of all the different and important slices of work a dean needs to accomplish. As a result, I started trying to do it all. But there didn’t seem to be enough hours in the day, or days in the week, and as a result I felt ineffective.
During this period, I asked Tim if he had any advice for me. He replied, “You’re trying to do too much. You should have three things that you’re focused on, at most four.” It’s not complicated advice, but at that moment it helped me reframe the way I was looking at my role. It caused me to take pause early on in my tenure as dean and refocus. Now, I have three top priorities at any given time and plan my weeks and days around those focus points, while building time in my schedule to deal with less urgent or less strategic matters.
Since that conversation with Tim, he’s continued to provide lessons about leadership to both me and our students. You can watch some of those insights, involving topics ranging from collaboration to career planning to the three areas *he* focuses on daily, excerpted from a talk he gave at Fuqua at this link.
I’ve enjoyed watching how Tim has applied his own authenticity in leading Apple, and I will always be grateful for his simple advice to “focus” at a time when I needed to hear it. It’s a concept I imagine applies to many of us in today’s fast-paced and sometimes frantic society. As we enter 2016 and think about how we want to spend this next year, it’s a lesson worth pondering that can help us best maximize our time and potential to make a real difference both at work and in the world.
This article originally appeared on LinkedIn as a post from Bill Boulding, dean of Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, and has been reposted with permission. You can find the latest information about news, events and faculty research from the school here.
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