The next five steps for Apple's Tim Cook and Yahoo's Carol Bartz

So you're Tim Cook and this is the second time you've had to fill in for Apple legend, founder and object of the company's cult of personality chief Steve Jobs. What does your inbox look like today and how are you going to go about building Apple in an economy in tatters?

First, let me say I hope Jobs fully recovers from his health issues and is indeed back at the Apple helm in six months. He may be irascible with the press and such, but he has fundamentally changed the computer industry, the music industry and the mobile communications business for the better. Here are my suggestions for the five top priorities for interim boss Tim Cook.

1. Be Tim, not Steve. Cook has shown he knows manufacturing, inventory control and industrial design. In this economy, those may be the most important assets of any high tech chief. Drive costs down, quality up and add features to promote upgrades are three good goals.

2. Delegate the Steve updates to someone else. You don't want to spend all your time with the analysts and press talking about someone else's status.

3. Be the boss. Hire the people your company needs at this time and get rid of the ones who are not building a better Apple or are sadly unneeded in an exhausted consumer economy.

4. Think different. Just like the old ad adage said. You are the boss even in an interim and you need to stamp your direction on Apple. What product or service have you been considering that the boss was reluctant to undertake. If you believe in your intuition, you should be able to push it through the Apple inner circle.

5. Skip the black turtleneck. Please.

Now, different case, you're Carol Bartz and you are the boss in chief at Yahoo, a company that needs a big change. What do you do?

1. Be the boss. Install procedures, processes and people who can eliminate the principalities, subsume the egos and come out with a clear strategy of what Yahoo stands for.

2. Don't try to be like a little Google, Facebook, etc. Those companies have established a brand and have a solid image in the users' mind. The opportunity resides in making Yahoo the place where users can manage their financial, leisure and personal activities. In some cases, it may be a Yahoo developed service that does that work. In many cases, it would be services built around Yahoo alliances.

3. Don't rush up the wedding aisle. Yes, Microsoft offered a huge pile of gold and got grumpy when it was rejected. That was before the big crash. Now you need to rebuild, build new alliances and probably sell the company when the company's finances and economic strength returns.

4. Remember the infrastructure. Amazon was smart to build an internal IT infrastructure which is sufficiently robust and adaptable to allow Amazon to start selling cloud computing time to outside customers. Google has built a closed house. If you walk around the company sufficiently you may find lots of internal capabilities that could become outside services.

5. Yahoo doesn't need to be fun again, it needs to be relevant today. Drop the exclamation point, please.