Thirteen-Hour Meeting as Onboarding Ritual

“Cook established exceedingly high expectations the first time he held an operations meeting of worldwide managers. In the weekly review, attendees went over what had gone wrong in the prior days, what needed to be fixed immediately, and what was coming up. These meetings were typically ninety minutes; sometimes they could stretch beyond two hours. On the day Cook took over, the weekly review went nearly thirteen hours. He insisted on a granular level of understanding and demanded fluency in the intricacies of every project. If a manager one week, in a lengthy presentation, projected that their team would ship 200,050 of something by Friday, Cook would remember. So the next week, if the manager said, “Yep, we met our numbers. We did two hundred thousand,” Cook would look at them and ask, with deadly seriousness: “And fifty?””

“By expecting precision, he was basically teaching it, instilling its importance in all of his colleagues so that his underlings would teach their underlings. As exceptional as that first thirteen-hour meeting was, the Friday meeting Cook held with top executives routinely became a four-hour review, a deep dive of spectacular detail into more than 120 pages of Excel numbers related to supply and demand across the global organization. There were so many rows and columns of numbers that the text was printed on special larger paper. Not everyone in these meetings wore glasses when Cook was hired; after a few years, they all did.”