Corporate Antihero John Sculley

 

INC.: Before there was the falling out with Jobs, there was a much publicized honeymoon. To the world, you were the "dynamic duo." Looking back, was there some way you could have preserved that successful collaboration?

SCULLEY: Our first year together really was incredible. We had gotten through a few small crises, and the working relationship between Steve and me was going as well as either one of us could ever have wished. In fact, after the first year, Steve decided to hold a surprise first-anniversary party for me with the entire board of directors and the executive staff and all their spouses. And Steve presented me with what I'd guess you'd call a montage with various memorabilia showing the chronology of my transition from Pepsi to Apple. In accepting it, I said the reason that I was so happy and why I felt Apple was working as well as it was was because Apple had one leader -- Steve and me. He brought the technology and the product vision, and I brought the marketing and the management experience. And it wasn't until later on, when we got into trouble, that I started to realize that what had appeared to be a strength was actually the beginnings of a potentially serious problem for Apple. We were so busy trying to make decisions between ourselves that we were cutting off the rest of the organization from the process. We were running a top-down organization, and people were beginning to resent it.

INC.: Was there some incident that brought that home to you?

SCULLEY: I think it was in the fall of 1984, at a planning meeting with middle managers and the executive staff. By that time, things had been going so well that I'd given Steve the title of executive vice-president, and he had become very vocal about things -- not just about the Macintosh division, which he headed, or new technologies, which he understood far better than I did, but about almost everything that went on at Apple. And I remember at this meeting Steve made a pitch that some of the different divisions of Apple -- the sales organization, the finance section, and so forth -- be run as if they were separate companies, so that each could take on the feel of a small business. It was an interesting idea, but nobody else was really buying it. As we were leaving the room after a rather heated discussion, I heard somebody whisper to a colleague, "Why doesn't Sculley shut him up?" And for the first time, I began thinking to myself that I had made a mistake. Steve was no longer content to be Steve Jobs the product visionary; he wanted to be Steve Jobs the manager.

INC.: Which was precisely not what people had in mind when they hired you.

SCULLEY: In fact, a few months later, when the board of directors was reviewing my own performance, they expressed the same concern: that I was sharing too much of the power with Steve and not running the corporation myself.

INC.: They were concerned that things had reverted back to the way they were before you came?

SCULLEY: No, they were worried that things were even worse. When I arrived, one of the original founders, Mike Markkula, was filling in as CEO, and he was making most of the business decisions. Steve was leading what was then a small project of fewer than 100 people -- the Mac -- without any profit-and-loss responsibility. And he was only one of several of the company's resident technologists.

After I came, I kept handing Steve more and more authority. By the time of the final blowup, he was in a significant operating role, with more than 1,000 people reporting to him. He was the company's public spokesman and its undisputed resident technologist. I was supposed to be the CEO. Yet I was sandwiched between a visionary chairman above me and an operating executive below me overseeing the most critical parts of the company. And they were one and the same person! It created a nearly impossible situation.

INC.: When you finally did get control, and Jobs was out, one of the first decisions you made after reorganizing the company was to "open up" the Macintosh computer. And it always seemed to me that that was an appropriate technical metaphor for what was going on at the corporate level.

SCULLEY: The Macintosh was as much a personification of Steve Jobs as it was of Apple. It represented a very focused vision of how Steve saw the world. And just as Henry Ford felt when he created the Model T, that he was creating more than simply a product, Steve felt that with the Macintosh he would change the way people would view the computer. He didn't see the need for anyone to be able to modify the machine -- you could order it in any color, just as long as it was black, to use the Ford analogy. And what it meant was that, as Apple began to compete in a marketplace where there were lots of alternative products from competitors that offered a wide range of openness, the Macintosh became more an more isolated, because it still focused on the internal vision of the founder rather than on the needs of the customers. And it was becoming clear that our customers wanted more computing power, more memory, more disk capacity, and they wanted more flexibility in terms of connecting the Macintosh to other computers.

INC.: In fact, one criticism of Apple at the time was that it was too cocky -- that Apple was not interested in what customers wanted, and that Jobs would rather not sell a computer than sell one that might hook into a network, say, with an IBM.

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