Donald Trump never asked the chief executive of Apple for leadership advice.
Still, Tim Cook could certainly teach the Republican presidential nominee about the art of the apology, telling the Washington Post in an interview published over the weekend that it is important for a leader to admit mistakes and move on.
“The classic big-company mistake is to not admit their mistake. They double down on them,” Cook said. “Their pride or ego is so large that they can’t say we did something wrong. And I think the faster you do that, the better — change gears to something else.”
Cook wasn’t asked about Trump, but it doesn’t take much deep analysis to find the parallels here.
In recent months, Trump has failed to apologize for a raft of offensive comments ― for example, lashing out at Gold Star parents Ghazala and Khizr Khan after the Democratic National Convention and for days afterward. Then he was criticized for incendiary language that seemed to suggest gun rights activists could “do something” if Hillary Clinton were elected.
Last week, Trump refused to back away from his statement that President Barack Obama founded ISIS. Instead he later said he was just being sarcastic.
“It’s the douchebag’s apology,” John Oliver said of the sarcasm explanation Sunday night on HBO’s Last Week tonight.
Douchiness aside, it’s certainly not what Cook was talking about. The Washington Post asked the 55-year-old whether he’s made any mistakes and learned from them. Cook mentioned the disastrous 2012 launch of Apple Maps ― the app was terrible, giving people the wrong directions, sending drivers to places that did not exist in reality. At the time Cook was fairly quick to apologize and the company changed the way it releases new software.
He tells the Post: “We had the self-honesty to admit this wasn’t our finest hour and the courage to choose another way of doing it. That’s important. It’s the only way an organization learns.”
You’ll never learn if you don’t first understand what you’ve done wrong. Not apologizing can be a sign that you don’t actually think you’ve made an error.
Trump’s Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton has also been criticized for taking too long to own her mistakes: not apologizing for her vote to approve the invasion of Iraq until 2014, for example. She also was called out for waiting too long to admit that her private email server was a mistake ― and then for diminishing that decision.
Of course, CEOs are operating in a different world than politicians, who are beholden to the more fluid meter of public opinion. An apology could be construed as a sign of weakness. In the business world, that sign could well be eclipsed by bottom line financial results.
Apple, after all, is the most valuable company in the world and the most profitable public company in the U.S. Politicians running for office don’t have the same kind of hard numbers to back them up ― particularly candidates like Trump, who has no political track record to bolster his credentials.
Cook’s comments are in line with his reputation as a more humble leader ― his predecessor Steve Jobs was less quick to say sorry. Cook’s style is also emblematic of an emerging trend in the corporate world toward more openness, replacing the more autocratic leadership style embodied by Trump in his role on his reality show “The Apprentice.”
“You’re fired,” is not the kind of tagline that works in this more modest universe.
Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims ― 1.6 billion members of an entire religion ― from entering the U.S.