Comment by philwelch

I’ve been in so many meetings where a “someone should...” statement got quietly dropped and never acted on and then forgotten. Establishing that “someone should do X” is an executive decision to be carried out ASAP, in a way that’s clear to everyone in the room, is effective in the long run.

I’m willing to bet everyone else in that room, from that day forward, whenever they heard Tim Cook say “someone should” take charge of a situation that they were responsible for, just said, “I’m on it”, immediately stood up, left the meeting, and made it happen. And that’s a scalable, sustainable, well-oiled machine. The fact that Tim could set that up with a single cold, pointed comment to demonstrate how he expected his staff to respond to him is what makes the story.

The meetings where Tim said someone should do something and someone just did it without any further bureaucracy or follow-up emails about action items or specific allocation of tasks to individual people: those meetings don’t make a good story.