Since the Tim Cook became Apple’s chief executive, worked hard to cement his own legacy at the tech giant – but still admires his predecessor’s leadership style Steve Jobs.

“I knew I couldn’t be Steve (when he became CEO),” Cook, 62, told GQ on Monday. “I don’t think anyone could be Steve. I think he was a once-in-a-hundred-years kind of person, a role model without any exaggeration. And what I had to do was become the best version of myself.” But that doesn’t mean Cook couldn’t pick up a trick or two on Apple leadership from Jobs’ “book.”

Cook said he admired how Jobs kept everyone at Apple on the same page standards of creativity and pushed them to their limits – regardless of whether they worked in research, marketing or any other department.

“One of the things I loved about him was that he didn’t expect innovation from just one team in the company or creativity from just one team,” Cook said. “He was waiting for her everywhere in the company.” Cook experienced this first hand. Before taking the reins of Apple as CEO in 2011, he was the multinational’s head of global sales and operations. And in this role, he was expected to be inventive.

What he learned from Jobs allowed him to win over … challengers after he became CEO, some of whom argued that he wasn’t experienced enough in making products to … fill his predecessor’s shoes. But under his leadership, Apple has grown into a company of many trillion dollars. Cook oversaw the launch of Airpods, the Apple Watch and the M1 processor, a next-generation processor now found in most of the company’s newest devices.

Apple has also expanded into services — such as its streaming platform Apple TV+. Cook could not have led any of these initiatives without first learning from Jobs, he said at the Vox Media 2022 Code Conference in Los Angeles: “He was the best teacher I ever had, with a difference. Those teachings are there, not just in me, but in a whole group of people who are (at Apple).”

Today, the Apple CEO still follows some of Jobs’ old “traditions,” such as the 9 a.m. meetings. every Monday, he told GQ. But he doesn’t do it out of nostalgia, he clarified. “We don’t look back that far,” Cook said. “We’re always focused on the future, and we try to feel like we’re at that ‘starting line’ where you can really dream and have big ideas that aren’t limited by the past, for some reason.”