'When is it okay to break the rules?' asked an MBA student at Duke's Fuqua School of Business to Apple CEO, Timothy D. Cook, during an hour-long session on ethical leadership, intuition, collaboration, and career planning, May 29. Responding to the question, Cook said to 'rarely follow the rules' and advised the audience to 'write [their] own rules.'

Cook, a 1988 graduate of Duke's Fuqua School of Business, said that performing things according to a 'formulaic manner' is a 'rotten strategy' that never lets an individual succeed better than their competitors.

An excerpt of the speech:

"I think you should rarely follow the rules. I think you should write the rules. If you follow things in a formulaic manner, you will wind up at best being the same as everybody else. ... If you want to excel you can't do that. I watched a lot of companies do that, and I think that's a rotten strategy. I think you need to write your own rules."

Cook's challenging tenure as Apple CEO began after the death of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. Cook is now handling the responsibility of helming the company in a growing competitive market.

Here is the video of Cook's speech to the students:

Samsung is the biggest competitor of Apple in the mobile phone market. Recently, Samsung delivered 10 million Galaxy S4 phones across 60 countries in less than a month, when compared to Apple's 37.4 million iPhones in the recent quarter. At the D11 conference, Tuesday, Cook said that the company aims for quality and satisfaction for the users rather than quantity.