Odyssey's Odyssey

Or, how to write a book and run a company at the same time

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How can you manage a company during a turbulent period and find the energy to write about your adventures at the same time? Far from hindering him in his management of Apple Computer Inc., chief executive officer John Sculley says writing Odyssey gave him new insights and taught him new tricks.

A quick example: in trying to explain in Odyssey what Apple would be like in the year 2000, Sculley learned to turn his planning process upside down. Instead of beginning with the late 1980s and looking forward, he now starts by trying to imagine what the world will be like 12 years out. "We try to picture what the products will be and then say, what technology should we be working on today to help us get there?"

Sculley still had time to plot Apple's future because he wasn't spending all day every day writing a book. "We made the decision in the summer of 1986 to have the book out by the end of 1987, but I didn't have a year to take off and write it," he says. "I said, if our technology is as good as we say it is, there should be a way to do it."

To start things off, Sculley spent a week -- up to 12 hours a day -- talking with coauthor John A. Byrne and their Harper & Row editor. These conversations, recorded by a court stenographer, produced 2,000 pages of transcript. Later, as the book progressed, Sculley would get up most mornings at 4:00 and write for an hour, send his jottings to Byrne via modem, and get questions back. This communication formed the basis for the total of six weeks the two men spent together.

The result: a book Sculley is happy with. "The [other] CEO biographies I looked at seemed to be monuments to their [authors'] accomplishments, written by looking backward at their careers.

"I am at midcareer," says Sculley, 49, "and wanted to look forward."