Many companies remain inextricably tied to their iconic founders—from Mark Zuckerberg serving as the face of Meta to Warren Buffett leading Berkshire Hathaway for decades. That tether gives founder-built companies a singular identity, yet it also makes succession one of the most delicate tests in corporate leadership, with successors measured against an outsize legacy. But when the time came for Tim Cook to take the reins of Apple, the brand's late cofounder Steve Jobs instructed him to forge his own path at the now-$5 trillion giant. Fifteen years after Jobs' passing, that advice continues to guide the technology company's leaders.

"[Jobs'] advice to me was 'Never ask what I would do, just do the right thing,'" Cook told CBS Sunday Morning in an interview earlier this year.

The counsel stemmed from a lesson Jobs had absorbed while working with Disney. The Apple cofounder was also one of the three founding fathers of Pixar Animation Studios, purchasing the group from LucasFilm in 1986. Entertainment behemoth Disney later acquired Pixar in 2006, and during his time with the studio, Jobs picked up on a trend he was determined to avoid.

"He had watched Disney go through this paralysis of sitting around and talking about what Walt [Disney] would do," Cook explained. "And he did not want that for Apple."

The former Apple CEO noted that the business, at the time, had never had a "professional transition" at the chief executive level; the previous successions had always been carried out in a time of "panic." Jobs wanted to do things differently. So he called Cook over to his house and offered him the CEO job—with no pressure to emulate his leadership style.

"I'll never forget that and it was such a gift for me, because he took off of my shoulder this question of, 'What would Steve do?'" Cook continued. "I just put my head down and thought, 'I'm going to be the best version of myself.'"

Cook brought his own flair, but stuck to core principles

Cook first joined Apple in 1998, after stints at PC maker Compaq and IBM, less than one year after Jobs had returned as interim CEO. From 2000 onward, Jobs led as permanent CEO while Cook worked his way up through high-level positions, becoming the company's chief operating officer in 2005. At the start of September this year, Cook stepped down from the CEO role, and John Ternus took his place in the top job.

Over Cook's nearly three decades at the company—working under Jobs until his passing in October 2011—he learned which principles are essential to Apple's "DNA." While Jobs advised the current CEO, Ternus, to do his own thing, the cofounder also imparted everlasting fundamentals that will always be core to the company. For Apple's next chapter, the question to watch is how Ternus balances that dual inheritance: honoring the fundamentals while charting a course of his own.

"[Jobs] had the vision that the collaboration was something that would produce great results. That one plus one is equal to three, not two. That if you share an idea and debate it, it gets bigger and better," Cook explained in the CBS interview. "If you care enough that you call somebody at 10 at night because you just had an idea, that incredible things can come out of that."

According to Cook, the strategy of "arguing and debating everything" in Apple meetings—a dynamic that breeds bigger and better ideas—dates back to the origin of the business. He also pointed to strengths he cultivated within the company, particularly around accessibility, privacy, and education. Still, he has kept the collaboration culture that Jobs popularized through his decades of leadership.

"[Jobs] had an idea of focus that you say 'no' to a thousand things to say 'yes' to the one that's truly important," Cook continued. "And that when you do something, you should do it at an excellence level where good isn't good enough: it has to be insanely great."

The advice other business leaders received from Jobs

Throughout his career, Jobs advised many on how to step into their own success—from college graduates to leaders of billion-dollar companies, with his counsel spanning industries from cloud software to coffee.

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, said on Lenny's Podcast in 2024 that Jobs helped him overcome "entrepreneur's block." The Apple cofounder instructed him to do three things: grow the business 10 times larger in two years, land a big customer for the Salesforce automation product, and build an application economy. Benioff believed Jobs wanted him to build an app store, so he created AppExchange, later gifting Apple the App Store trademark and the appstore.com domain in return for Jobs' help. That advice "dramatically influenced me in my career and my whole life," Benioff said.

Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz also received some tough love from Jobs that ultimately set him on the path to success. It was 2008, and the coffee chain was in a crisis. After Schultz confided in Jobs about the company's troubles, Jobs advised him to fire his entire leadership team—reasoning that they would all be gone within nine months anyway. The then-Starbucks CEO found the idea preposterous, but said Jobs proved right in the end: everyone on the team left, except for one person.

Jobs also offered critical guidance for young job-seekers aspiring to greatness: do the work you love. It is a lesson that carried the tech pioneer through being ousted from the company he had built and through crises such as Apple's near-bankruptcy.

"Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do," Jobs said during his 2005 Stanford University commencement speech. "If you haven't found it yet, keep looking—and don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it."

A version of this story was published on Fortune.com on March 11, 2026.