My first boss at ABC told me I wasn’t promotable, so I’d have to put him in the category of “bad boss.” Clearly he had poor judgment. 
 
 Q. How did you react to that? 
 
 A. Well, when you’re 23 years old and you’re told you’re not promotable, there’s something kind of surprising to you about that, particularly when you’ve just embarked on a career and you have hopes for yourself — not necessarily high hopes, but I had hopes. I’d say it was just shocking. I don’t remember even being able to react, but I found another job very quickly, fortunately, within the company. It’s obviously a profound moment in your career. And the moment remains pretty vivid in my mind. 
 
 Q. Did you change anything about the way you presented yourself? 
 
 A. Well, it’s a long time ago. Of course, at 23 you think you know everything about yourself. But looking back, now that I’m 58, I don’t know whether it was conscious or not, but I must have believed in myself enough so that I didn’t really let it get to me. And I was so lucky to have had another opportunity presented to me right away. Had that not been the case, I might have reacted very differently. 
 
 But I rose above it very quickly, and there was a lesson in that. I think it toughened me up a little bit more. It made me a little bit more cautious, maybe a little bit more, just generally, wary about people. I talked earlier about the need to be an optimist. It challenges your optimism a little bit, particularly when you’re just starting out in your career. 
 
 Q. Do you recall an insight that put your career on a different trajectory? 
 
 A. Well, as you’d expect in a 35-year career, there are twists and turns along the way. I started off wanting very much to be a newscaster. I began as a weatherman and I learned very quickly I wasn’t very good at it. I’d say the first lesson I learned is, if you’re not good at one thing, try something else. Don’t stick with something you’re not good at unless you think you could turn yourself into someone who’s good at that. 
 
 Q. What career advice do you give to people? 
 
 A. When you navigate the sometimes tricky waters of a big corporation, there’s a need to be really patient. When it comes to managing a career, patience is extremely important because people set goals for themselves that often are unrealistic. It’s great to do that because you want to be ambitious, but you don’t have control of a lot of circumstances. 
 
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 And when you set these goals and they’re not met, the reasons are beyond your control, it creates impatience and you then make career decisions out of impatience. That’s a big mistake. One of my bosses once said that just when you think nothing’s going to change, everything changes. And you reach a point where you’re not sure any opportunity is going to present itself, and the next day you come in and you’re — boom — smacked in the face with some huge new opportunity you didn’t even predict was going to occur. That happened to me a number of times. 
 
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 Q. When you talk to your managers about leadership, what do you tell them? 
 
 A. Most of it is by example. But when I get a chance to preach a bit, which I do to some extent, I talk about the importance of patience. I talk about the need to be direct with your people. I talk frequently about the need to be accessible — very important for a leader. You’ve got to get out there, and I exhort everyone who works for me to do just that. 
 
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 Q. How do you stay in touch with people throughout the company? 
 
 A. It takes a lot of getting around. You have to see people, and not get too involved in too many extracurricular activities and all the other gravitational pulls that exist in the business world. When you meet people face to face, you’ve got to project an accessibility — that you can get on an elevator and actually have a conversation with someone or go to an employee cafeteria and talk with people, or stroll a floor of a building and connect with people. I make it part of my schedule to do that. 
 
 I was in Orlando recently, where we have over 60,000 people. I couldn’t touch every one of them, but many of them knew I was there, because I was out seeing people and getting around, and that’s a good thing. One, you show you care. Two, it gives you an ability to hear people. But I wouldn’t hear them if I stayed at Burbank in my office all the time. 
 
 Q. Let’s talk about hiring. How do you do it? 
 
 A. Carefully. I try to get to know someone, and I obviously use references as an important guide as well. Warren Buffett, who was the largest shareholder of Capital Cities/ABC and someone I am fortunate to have both known and learned from, is fond of saying, “When you hire someone, you look for brains, energy and integrity, and if they don’t have the third, integrity, you better watch out, because the first two will kill you.” 
 
 And so you obviously want to hire someone who’s smart and you want to hire someone who has energy, because that’s required in many of these jobs. But integrity is the most important factor. So getting to know them, getting under their skin to the extent possible, becomes important. And I also look for qualities in people beyond that. I love curiosity, particularly in our business — being curious about the world, but also being curious about your business, new business models, new technology. 
 
 Q. Give me some examples of questions that you would ask to get to know somebody? 
 
 A. I don’t have any tricks. I try to learn more about a person, what he does outside of work, his family, what their interests are — someone with too many interests is usually faking it. But you can quickly determine whether they’ve got a couple of interests, or one in particular that they’re really passionate about. Passion suggests some level of curiosity, by the way, too. 
 
 I try to determine whether someone is interested in new technology, because technology is changing our businesses right before our eyes, particularly consumer behavior. And if you’re not curious about technology and its potential impact on your life, then you’ll have no clue what its impact might be on someone else’s life. 
 
 I don’t discount nervousness, because everyone should be a little nervous when they’re interviewed, particularly if a job is important. But I like someone who’s got an ability to look me in the eye and communicate effectively, even if they don’t know me. 
 
 Q. What are some things you do to manage your time effectively? 
 
 A. Well, I get up very early and I get to work early. I get up at 4:30 every morning. I like the quiet time. It’s a time I can recharge my batteries a bit. I exercise and I clear my head and I catch up on the world. I read papers. I look at e-mail. I surf the Web. I watch a little TV, all at the same time. I call it my quiet time but I’m already multitasking. I love listening to music, so I’ll do that in the morning, too, when I’m exercising and watching the news. 
 
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 I also have to be focused throughout the day. The comedian Dennis Miller once talked about men using remote-controlled devices, and he called them ferrets on double espressos. I try not to be a ferret on a double espresso. You need to look someone in the eye and listen to what they’re talking about and focus on the subject at hand. I admit that I fray a little bit around the edges. It’s just a balance. 
 
 Q. Are you a gadget person? 
 
 A. Have been all my life. I love gadgets. I’m an iPhone guy. I know that Steve Jobs is our largest shareholder, but I was an iPod and iTunes user before that. I also don’t like too many things in my pockets. I don’t like carrying things around, and the three-in-one — I have my music, I have my telephone and I have my e-mail all in one gadget that fits in my pocket. That’s sheer beauty, and that’s perfection for me. 
 
 Q. Your favorite app when you want to decompress? 
 
 A. I play Scrabble. I like word games. ||||| Do you enjoy sleeping in? Well we researched and found out that 85% of fortune 500 CEO’s wake up before 6 am. Is that a coincidence? If you want to maximize your success while achieving the best possible balance in your life, you may want to take a fresh look at what time you wake up and what you do with your time before getting to the office. Here is a list of what these individuals do when they wake up. 
 
 STEVE REINEMUND – (CEO of PepsiCo) Is up at 5:30am down stairs with his organized papers. He reads the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and the Dallas Morning News. 
 
 RYAN SEACREST – (American Idol Host) He wakes up at 5:30 am to go running. “I don’t stay out until 2am which everyone might think. I’m not 21 anymore I have goals I am trying to accomplish. A line in a William Blake poem inspired me to think differently about my day: ‘Think in the morning, act in the noon, read in the evening, and sleep at night.”” 
 
 GERRY LAYBOURNE – (CEO of the Oxygen Channel) – She is awake by 6am and out the door by 6:30am. 
 
 However, she adds a unique twist to her schedule: “Once or twice a week, I go for a walk in Central Park with a young person seeking my advice. This is my way of helping bring along the next generation. And if someone is up early in the morning then they are serious about life. I can’t take time at the office to do this, but doing it in the morning allows me to get exercise and stay connected with young people at the same time.” 
 
 HAIM SABAN – (chairman and CEO of Saban Capital Group) He starts email right after his first cup of coffee at ‘6:02 a.m.’ and works it for about an hour before his 75 minute morning exercise regimen. 
 
 PADMASREE WARRIOR – (Chief Technology Officer for Motorola) She rises at 4:30 a.m., spends an hour on email, reads most of the news online, and then does an hour of either cardio or resistance training each morning. This allows her to get her son read for school and drop him off, and still get to work by 8 or 8:30 in the morning. 
 
 STEPHEN KING – (author) – I wake up between 6am and 7am and begin writing not a minute later than 8am. “I have my vitamin pill and my music, sit in the same seat, and the papers are all arranged in the same places.” 
 
 MATT OUIMET, (president Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide) He rises at 5:30 a.m. and leaves the house at 6 a.m. to get to the office very early — “I’ve always been anxious to get to work: game time.” 
 
 C.S. LEWIS – (author) He awakes by 6:30am to go on a walk either alone or by himself. “I would choose always to breakfast at exactly eight and to be at my desk by nine, there to read or write till one.” 
 
 FRED ROGERS – (Mr. Rogers Neighborhood) Mr. Rogers is awake by 5am but will sometimes think in bed until 5:30am. Nearly every morning of his life, Mister Rogers would go swimming. 
 
 (Excerpts taken from finance.yahoo.com/expert/article/leadership/23188 and http://www.ceoread.com) ||||| He inherited the most valuable company in the world from one of the greatest innovators in history. In 2012 he made Apple his own 
 
 Marco Grob for TIME 
 
 Tim Cook has the decidedly nontrivial distinction of being the first CEO of Apple since the very first to come to power without blood on his hands. For most of its history, Apple has had a succession problem: it had no internal mechanism for transferring power from one CEO to the next without descending into civil war in between. “Each time,” Cook says, “the way that the CEO was named was when somebody got fired and a new one came in.” 
 
 This clearly bothered Steve Jobs, because he spoke to Cook about it shortly before he died. “Steve wanted the CEO transition to be professional,” Cook says. “That was his top thing when he decided to become chairman. I had every reason to believe, and I think he thought, that that was going to be in a long time.” As we now know, it wasn’t. 
 
 (Interactive Timeline: Tim Cook and the Rise of Apple) 
 
 As long as he was handpicking his successor, you’d think Jobs would have chosen someone in his own image, but he and Cook, who was Jobs’ COO at Apple, are in a lot of ways diametrical opposites. Jobs was loud, brash, unpredictable, uninhibited and very often unshaven. Cook isn’t. He doesn’t look like the CEO of Apple, he looks more like an Apple product: quiet, tidy, carefully curated, meticulously tooled and at the same time strangely warm and inviting. He doesn’t look like Jobs, he looks like something Jobs would have made. Cook’s flawless cap of white hair could have been designed by Jony Ive and fabricated in China out of brushed aluminum. 
 
 And like an Apple product, Cook runs smooth and fast. When Jobs died on Oct. 5, 2011, of pancreatic cancer, there were questions about whether Cook could lead Apple. Some, myself included, wondered whether Apple was even a viable company without Jobs. Since then Cook has gone about his business apparently unintimidated by his role as successor to one of the greatest innovators in history. Cook’s record hasn’t been flawless, but he has presided in a masterly way over both a thorough, systematic upgrading of each of the company’s major product lines and a run-up in the company’s financial fortunes that can only be described as historic. 
 
 Cover Photograph by Marco Grob for TIME 
 
 On the day Jobs died, Apple was valued at $351 billion; at press time its market cap stood at $488 billion, more than that of Google and Microsoft. That’s and as in plus: Apple is now worth significantly more than those companies combined. Apple’s cash hoard alone comes to more than $120 billion. It was news in 2011 when Apple passed Exxon Mobil to become the world’s most valuable company. Now Exxon Mobil can barely see Apple’s taillights in the distance, across an $83 billion lead. 
 
 And Cook has done it his way. Jobs was famously over the top: he came at you from across the room, flashing his lightning-bolt eyebrows, and he browbeat you till you either agreed with him or pretended to, just to make him for God’s sake stop. That’s not how Cook operates. He’s a seducer, a Southern drawler, slow and soft-spoken. He has been observed winking. He doesn’t come at you; he waits for you to come to him. And sooner or later you do, not because you have to but because, dang it, you want to. 
 
 Cook himself is reluctant to lean too hard on the contrast. “I think there’s some obvious differences,” he says. (He allows himself a chuckle at the understatement.) “The way we conduct ourselves is very different. I decided from negative time zero — a long time before he talked to me about his decision to pass the CEO title — that I was going to be my own self. That’s the only person that I could do a good job with being.” 
 
 (LIST: 10 Key Moments in Apple’s History) 
 
 That’s what Jobs wanted. He didn’t want Cook to be a Jobs knockoff. He wanted Cook to be Cook. “He said, ‘From this day forward, never ask what I would do. Just do what’s right.’ I brought up a couple of examples: ‘Suppose A — do you really want me to make the call?’ Yes. Yes! He talked about Disney and what he saw had happened to Disney [after Walt Disney died], and he didn’t want it to happen to Apple.” 
 
 Cook does have a few things in common with Jobs. He’s a workaholic, and not of the recovering kind. He wakes up at 3:45 every morning (“Yes, every morning”), does e-mail for an hour, stealing a march on those lazy East Coasters three time zones ahead of him, then goes to the gym, then Starbucks (for more e-mail), then work. “The thing about it is, when you love what you do, you don’t really think of it as work. It’s what you do. And that’s the good fortune of where I find myself.” 
 
 (Special Report: The Cult of Apple in China) ||||| Tim Cook wakes up incredibly early, and he's happy about it. Reuters/Lucy Nicholson They say the early bird catches the worm, and research suggests there might be some truth to the old adage. 
 
 Waking up with (or before) the sun allows executives like AOL's Tim Armstrong and Pepsi's Indra Nooyi to get a head start on the day, knocking out tasks before the rest of the world has rolled out of bed. 
 
 Those "extra" hours also give them a chance to do some creative thinking, fit in a workout, and spend time with family. 
 
 Ahead, 24 early risers who may convince you never to hit snooze again. 
 
 Max Nisen and Aaron Taube contributed to earlier versions of this article.
– Owls, hang your heads in shame. And larks—well, you may not be as lark-like as you think you are. Business Insider has compiled a list of 24 uber-successful luminaries who laugh in the face of the snooze button and rise before the sun to cross a bunch of items off their to-do lists before they even start their morning commute. Here, five early risers and their oh-dark-thirty routines: Tim Cook, 3:45am: The Apple CEO goes through email, hits the gym, takes care of more email at Starbucks, then goes to work. "The thing about it is, when you love what you do, you don't really think of it as work," he tells Time. Bob Iger, 4:30am: The Disney CEO thinks of the early hours as a "quiet time" before work, for exercising, listening to tunes, reading the paper, checking email, and watching TV—all at the same time. "It's a time I can recharge my batteries a bit," he told the New York Times. Brett Yormark, 3:30am: The Brooklyn Nets CEO told SellingPower.com that he's in the office by 4:30am so he can send motivational email to his staff (part of a "who can get up the earliest" competition with his brother, Michael, the ex-CEO of the Florida Panthers). He doesn't roll into work until 7am on weekends. Sallie Krawcheck, 4am: The former Citigroup CFO makes stumbling out of bed sound so relaxing. "I brew a cup of coffee, I keep the lights pretty low, I sometimes light a fire in the fireplace," she said in a LinkedIn post, noting that's the time when she's most creative. She admits she's "out of gas by about 8pm." Geraldine Laybourne, 6am: The ex-Oxygen Media CEO is out the door by 6:30, sometimes looking for young people to give advice to during her weekly walks in Central Park. "If someone is up early in the morning, then they are serious about life," she has said. Read the full list at Business Insider.