IBM Watson: Apple’s Tim Cook is tech’s ‘most imaginative’ CEO

“Silicon Valley’s most powerful imagination belongs to a very powerful CEO,” Benjamin Snyder reports for CNBC. “That’s according to recent data from job search firm Paysa, which used IBM’s supercomputer Watson to determine that Apple CEO Tim Cook is the tech industry’s ‘most imaginative’ leader. Cook is followed by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Oracle’s Larry Ellison and Cisco’s Chuck Robbins.”

“It’s a fitting title for Cook, given his close work with the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs over the years,” Snyder reports. “A growth strategy expert recently told CNBC that Apple’s success comes from Jobs’ penchant for innovation and his imaginative thinking, and Cook has demonstrated his own prowess since taking over as CEO in 2011. He’s overseen the company as it’s developed a slew of new products, including driverless cars.”

Snyder reports, “To arrive at these results, Paysa fed ‘speeches, essays, books, the transcripts of interviews and other forms of communication produced by those highlighted above’— over 2,500 words — through the Watson Personality Insights API.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Anybody who can say, “And now, with the TV app, there’s really no reason to watch TV anywhere else,” certainly has no shortage of imagination.

We kid. He may not be the most charismatic CEO in the world, but Apple could certainly do (and surely has done) much worse in the CEO department. We haven’t yet really seen what Tim Cook’s Apple can accomplish, but we have a growing sense that it’s coming and it’s going to be insanely great!

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]

19 Comments

    1. This isn’t a reflection of whether or not he’s done a ‘great job’, it is an attempt to quantify an intangible quality (hint: you can’t quantify an intangible quality). He could be the most imaginative person ever born and be an abject failure. The exact opposite of that statement happens to be true 😛 Though he may be good at his job, individually, Cook is mediocre in the extreme, in my opinion. Computational thinking doesn’t relate to a world of nuance very well, alas. More and more I believe that being a certified dumbass is a requirement to work in the field of AI.

    1. I agree, as much as I loathe Bezos personally and politically, there is absolutely no other American CEO that comes close to his “real artists deliver” performance.

      1. Elon Musk is an American Citizen – an immigrant from South Africa. Tesla, Solar City, SpaceX, co founder of PayPal.

        Bezos is hard charger and binary about business kind of like someone well known to readers of this site. He is also willing to take risks and has approved products he personally did not like because the consensus of his staff thought them worthy. Amazon learns from it’s mistakes and keeps moving forward.

        In my direct investing (stock ownership instead of Mutual Finds) Apple, Tesla and Amazon are on my list of stocks I bought years ago. I feel that in general the market is due a correction and have not been buying lately, but I still hold those stocks and they have done exceptionally well.

        Tim Cook is an operations guy probably doing the best he can, but is in no way a visionary. Bezos has the fire in the belly of a founder like Steve Jobs did and knows what he wants to do.

      1. Bezos poured every cent back into the company which is the opposite of what Wall Street wants. The company would be nothing like it is today without him disregarding Wall Street who just likes fees from M&A.

        I believe the Whole Foods thing is going to be a monster. He did not buy a grocery chain- he bought a built out network of warehouses (stores) in high income zip codes all over America. Draw a 15 mile circle around the Whole Foods Chain footprint and you have the overwhelming majority of high income, high education customers that will buy groceries online.

        Amazon is coming directly after Blue Apron and other marketers of packaged, ready to cook meals. They can also expand the footprint of Amazon Fresh and leave the low income areas to Wall-Mart, Kroger and such.

        It is very much an Apple like strategy- go after the high end of the market and leave the low margin stuff to others. Whole Foods operates in a market of 15% margins where Was-Mart and Kroger play in a market of 1-2% margins. He can cut margins slightly and grow Whole Foods very quickly.

        Also of note, the Brick and Mortar chains that pushed laws to tax Amazon have nobody to blame but themselves. Once Amazon lost the tax advantage they decided to jump in and the Whole Foods thing is part of that plan.

        I would not be surprised to see Amazon products popping up in Whole Foods (store within a store) before it is over.

  1. This is a joke, right? How, in any way, shape, or form is ‘data’ on Tim Cook reflective of how people feel about it? Imaginative, my ass. This is a sad, sad world we are creating for ourselves.

  2. Ummm I don’t know about you all but I’m Cooked out. I really did like him at first but it’s been half a decade and Apple has really been frustrating the last several years.

    I don’t need brand new technology every other month but at Least keep your products up to date (macintosh).

    It’s not that difficult.

    Oh and also work on your quality control.

  3. I keep telling people: We’re still in the Dark Age of Computing!

    √ Verified.

    There’s no such thing as real artificial ‘intelligence’. All we have are advanced ‘expert’ systems that traverse the database they’re provided or gather themselves. If the data is wrong, their ‘intelligence’ is wrong.

    I HOPE Hope hope we’re not going to start giving a rat’s about the ‘opinions’ of so-called artificial ‘intelligence’ gadgets. OMFG would that be annoying and boring. These thingys don’t have opinions. They only have data output.

    It’s time for some hilarious and sarcastic AI memes. This will have to do for now…

  4. Data in, data out. Given any specific parameters and Watson will give you an answer.

    Tim is not as bad as some make him out to be. Likewise not as good as others think he is. Still, at this time, he actually might be the best Apple can get.

    Steve was just that good. It’s hard to stand in his shadow.

  5. If Tim Cook believes he can sell iPhones in India, he must have quite an imagination. Android OS has 97% market share in India and that’s not going to budge at all. Apple built a factory in India and isn’t going to get anything back in return, not even appreciation. Indian consumers have no interest in owning iPhones when new Android smartphones sell for $50.

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