Steve Jobs was once asked at an Apple shareholder meeting by a shareholder who wanted get some insights into his deepest thinking: “What keeps you awake at night?” Mr. Jobs replied, “Shareholder meetings.” The wisdom of this insight was borne out last week when Mr. Jobs’s successor at Apple, Tim Cook, was asked at the annual shareholder meeting by the NCPPR, the conservative finance group, to disclose the costs of Apple’s energy sustainability programs, and make a commitment to doing only those things that were profitable. Cook replied “When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don’t consider the bloody ROI. We want to leave the world better than we found it.”
