Corporate Antihero John Sculley

 

INC.: One way companies try to hang on to the spirit of their earlier days is to be fairly aggressive about developing a corporate culture, which is something Apple is known for.

SCULLEY: I think the concept of culture has been misused a lot. It tends to limit a company by putting too much emphasis on tradition, on yesterday's myths and rituals, whose sole value is that they derive from an earlier time. Culture is a feel-good tool, a way for a company to remain comfortable with its habits. It is something that looks backward at the past rather than forward toward change.

INC.: Was one of your tasks, then, to break the Apple culture?

SCULLEY: It's true, we did have some cultural issues that were difficult for us to deal with. We've already talked about one -- the open Mac. When I first asked how our customers would communicate with other computers, somebody threw a floppy disk at me and said, "This. It's all we'll ever need." And they believed it! Well, we know today that, by the end of this decade, probably 85% of the personal computers that are out there are going to be, in some way, connected to other computers. So the original vision of one person, one computer that was so much part of the Apple culture had to be refined a bit: one person, one computer, but a computer connected to the rest of the world.

INC.: Any other cultural idols that had to be smashed?

SCULLEY: Oh, I suppose we used to celebrate the fact that you had the freedom to do anything you wanted at Apple, if you thought it was a better idea. That was fine when the company was a handful of people trying to invent new things. But it became very destructive when there was no focus or process for people to work together. After a while, what it meant was that we were treading water, we weren't developing new products.

INC.: When you first signed on, did you understand how powerful culture and myth and heroes would be?

SCULLEY: No, I really didn't until I'd been here a while. I remember the first time somebody said to me, "So-and-so is going to step outside of Apple for a year." And I said, "What do you mean, step outside of Apple?" And he said, "Oh, he's going off to start his own company for a while. But he'll be back." Well, I had never heard of anything like this. But I soon came to understand that the most powerful myth of all in Silicon Valley is the myth of the entrepreneur.

INC.: And you were working alongside the ultimate mythic figure, Steve Jobs.

SCULLEY: Actually, I had never viewed Steve as a hero. I thought of him as a protege, as a friend, but I never understood what a genuine folk hero he was. In the business world I came from, there weren't any folk heroes. There were Henry Ford and Tom Watson Sr., I suppose, but these weren't people who were on the scene. But now, here I was, in a world suddenly surrounded by living, breathing folk heroes, and I was not prepared for it.

INC.: Was the myth of Steve Jobs, in effect, another cultural idol that had to be smashed?

SCULLEY: I certainly didn't think of it in those terms -- I had never had more fun in dealing with anybody in my whole life than I did in dealing with Steve Jobs. But to get to your question -- yes, I think that an excessive emphasis on heroes can get out of hand. Large organizations cannot run without a very high degree of process and teamwork.

INC.: Did you feel there was the need to purge the corporation of the Jobs mythology in order to get it back on track?

SCULLEY: No -- to the contrary. I made sure we didn't purge the symbols. They are all over here -- the library, the museum. I've never avoided questions about Steve; I didn't pretend he no longer existed, because that would have been naive. I was trying to help preserve a company's roots that were almost inseparable between the founder and the company.

INC.: But without the help of the founder.

SCULLEY: Yes -- and I knew it was going to be harder that way.

INC.: How do you do that? You've made some interesting observations about the limitations of culture in trying to run a forward- rather than backward-looking organization. But organizations rely on myths and heroes because they need some sense of continuity and identity. What is the alternative?

SCULLEY: I think a better way for corporations to think about carrying the past into the future lies in the idea of genetic change. We know that in the human body, our cells change completely every seven years, and yet the same genetic code is present throughout our life, expressing itself differently in different organisms.

INC.: And how is genetic coding different from culture?

SCULLEY: Like culture, genetic coding imprints notions of corporate identity and values. But it does so in a way that is forward looking, that realizes that there will be internal changes responding to changes in the environment. Its perspective is not tribal, like culture's, but biological. Its focus is on the individual, not the group or the institution.

INC.: Maybe this is merely coincidental, but shortly after he left Apple, Steve Jobs also used a genetic metaphor. He told Newsweek that he would still feel good about Apple if he felt that his genes were still there. Do you think his genes are still there?

SCULLEY: I think that he and I are probably the wrong ones to judge that.

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