John Sculley on Steve Jobs

People always put Sculley down but the era that he was at Apple really opened doors for me in so many ways about twenty years ago. Hypercard showed me that you didn't have to be a programmer to make interactive media. CD-ROMs and QuickTime showed me that computers could be an entertainment medium. It was also during his run that color Macs came out and the crazy idea of built in sound cards came of age. And yes all of you can make fun of me loving my Newton -- but it was the first bold baby step in a market that didn't exist.

>>I think the separation was driven by Steve being in a real funk because the Macintosh, which he developed, was failing in early 1985. His vision was ahead of its time, the power of the microprocessor wasn't enough to do what he wanted to do and Mac sales were falling off.

We were still very dependent on the profits of Apple II. I felt we had to push profits of Apple II and Steve wanted to lower the price of the Mac to get sales up. We went to the board to decide.

The board made a decision and they asked Steve to step down as head of the Macintosh division. He still remained as chairman of the board.

But that was an incredible blow to the man who created the product, he was extremely hurt and pained by it.

To me, coming from corporate America, I was used to people being moved from job to job, because that's how it worked. Professional executives were reassigned, terminated, promoted all the time.

That's not what you do with founders of companies. Emphasis on the "That's not what you do with founders of companies. "

I think that's exactly what they used to do with many founders of companies. Over time though, the conventional wisdom on founders has started to change:

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http://bhorowitz.com/2010/04/28/why-we-prefer-founding-ceos/

I think the Parable of Steve Jobs has actually had a lot to do with that reversal.

Many lessons learned from this interview. My biggest takeaway: “I appreciate more today that Apple was never just a business to Steve. Apple is Steve Jobs and Steve Jobs is Apple.”

I think all founders need to strive towards this. If the company is an extension of the founders, you can bet that the need to be great will be upheld at the top level and should trickle down to all of its stakeholders.

  The majority of time I was at Apple, I was basically 
  focused on delivering the same kind of performance metrics 
  that I delivered at Pepsi. So, for example, when I joined 
  Apple we had just achieved $570 million of revenue in 1982 
  and we were No. 3 in market share. When I left Apple in 
  1993, we had reached $8.3 billion in revenue, Macintosh 
  was the No. 1 selling PC hardware product in the world, 
  Apple was the most profitable PC hardware company in the 
  world and we had $2 billion of cash.

That is an interesting point in defense of his tenure there. To his credit, he admits the rot began under him (and then things really went to hell under Spindler and Amelio).

Growing revenue 14X is not too shabby, though! In an alternate reality, maybe Sculley would have been Jobs' Ballmer, the corporate type focused on growing the current product, with Jobs tasked with making sure the company didn't miss the next technology wave.