Tim Cook at the Oxford Foundry

How does Apple stay close to customer? And recommendations for entrepreneurs?

• Focus groups don't really work because people will only tell you how to do incremental innovation. (This is the well-known Steve Jobs critique of consumer market research.) He chastised business schools for emphasizing "listening to the customer".
• Stay close to customer and listen to them; Apple does this by having retail stores. He reads customer emails for first hour of the day.
• If you're starting a business, recruit your friends who are not like you. If you're an engineer, get someone from liberal arts. If from UK, get someone from China. Common thread among them should be wanting to change the world.

How to deal with failure and adversity.

• Believe that the adversity will pass and that ultimately it will not be detrimental. Becomes a learning opportunity and process.

Inspiration:

• Meets with Apple users who are trying to "change the world". Retweeted US Air Force Academy's Superintendent's speech. https://twitter.com/tim_cook/status/914259440290848769

Tips on leadership:

• Leadership is fluid. Depending on what a team is doing, the "leader" may change, passing the role from one person to another on the team. Leaders anticipate this fluidity. So, everyone needs to develop leadership skills. Core to moving a business forward. 
• Leaders draw out what people may not be willing to contribute; bringing out the diversity in views is essential. Leaders amplify teams. They make it possible for 1+1 > 2.

Experience working with Steve Jobs:

• Taught Tim the value of focus. That you can't spread yourself too thin or you won't do good work. 
• That joy came from performing the daily things in life well. 
• Need to own your own technology. Control the experience.
• Best is better than most for Apple. In other words, an excellent product is better than one with large sales volume. (Perhaps this is making a virtue of necessity!)
• Best groups are like a musical band--works well together, with high trust and complement each other. There is no redundancy; all have to play their parts. 

General Advice:

• Courage to change is important (or as Tim pronounces it, "im-pohrr-tent").
• Need to have an inspiring vision to sustain a business and people in the business over the long run; money alone will be insufficient.
• Get ideas emerge when environment is created that thrives on debate. Minimizing conflict is not going to result in great outcomes. Have to make it not just acceptable but essential for people to debate things--but in a respectful, conflict of ideas manner.
• "Dead people don't disappoint you!"
• Most excited about AR above all the other technologies. Horizontal impact, in that it will spread out to energize many fields. In contra-distinction to VR, which is isolating and vertical. AR is profound and transformative in history.