- John Sculley
Infobox_Celebrity
name = John Sculley
birth_date = birth date and age|1939|4|6
birth_place =
death_date =
death_place =
occupation = President ofPepsiCo (1977-1983)CEO of Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.) (1983-1993) Partner atSculley Brothers, LLC (1995-Present)
salary =
networth =John Sculley (born
April 6 1939 ) is an American businessman. Sculley was vice-president (1970-1977) and president ofPepsiCo (1977-1983), until he becameCEO of Apple onApril 8 1983 , a position he held until leaving in 1993. Sculley is currently a partner in Sculley Brothers, a private investment firm formed in 1995. He is best known for hismarketing skills, particularly in his introduction of 'thePepsi Challenge ' at PepsiCo, which allowed the company to gain market share from its primary rival,Coca Cola . Sculley used similar marketing strategies at Apple throughout the 1980s and 1990s to mass marketMacintosh personal computer s. In May 1987, Sculley was namedSilicon Valley 's top-paid executive, with an annual salary of US$2.2M. [Malone, "Infinite Loop", pg 412.]Background and personal life
Sculley was born in the
United States , but within a week of his birth, he and his family were relocated toBermuda , and subsequently toBrazil and Europe.cite web|url=http://www.hospitalitynet.org/news//4008385.html|title=HITEC 2001 - John Sculley - Coaching New Businesses All Over The World|publisher=Hospitality Net|date=2001-06-25|accessdate=2007-12-13]Sculley attended high school at
St. Mark's School in Southborough, MA. He ultimately received abachelor's degree in architectural design fromBrown University and an MBA from theWharton School of Business at theUniversity of Pennsylvania [ [http://www.wharton.upenn.edu/alumni/leadership/ Wharton - Leadership Across Industries, High-Tech, John Sculley] ]Sculley married Donald M. Kendall's daughter. Donald Kendall was the CEO and Chairman of PepsiCo from 1971 to 1986.
Sculley has two brothers, Arthur and David Sculley, with whom he formed a private investment firm, Sculley Brothers LLC, in 1995.
1967–82: Sculley at Pepsi-Cola
Sculley joined the Pepsi-Cola division of
PepsiCo in 1967 as a trainee, where he participated in a six-month training program at abottling plant in Pittsburgh. [Sculley, "Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple", pg 30.] In 1970, at the age of 30, Sculley became the company's youngest marketing vice-president.As vice-president of marketing at Pepsi, Sculley initiated one of the company's first consumer-research studies, an extended in-home product test in which 350 families participated. As a result of the research, Pepsi decided to launch new, larger and more varied packages of their soft drinks. [Sculley, "Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple", pg 43-44.] In 1970, Pepsi set out to dethrone
Coca Cola as the market leader of the industry, in what would eventually become known as the Cola Wars.Pepsi began spending more on marketing and advertising, typically paying between US$200,000 and $300,000 for each television spot, while most companies spent between $15,000 and $75,000. With the Pepsi Generation campaign, Pepsi aimed to overturn Coca Cola's classic marketing. [Sculley, "Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple", pg 54.]
At Pepsi, Sculley also took the position of managing PepsiCo's International Food Operations division, shortly after he visited a failing potato-chip factory in Paris . PepsiCo's Food division was their only money-losing division, with revenues of US$83 million and losses of $16 million. To make the food division profitable, Sculley hired new managers from
Frito-Lay and improved product quality, as well as improving accounts and establishing financial controls. [Sculley, "Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple", pg 63-66] Within three years , the food division was making US$300 million in revenues and $40 million in profit. [Sculley, "Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple", pg 68]Sculley is best known at Pepsi for the Pepsi Challenge, an advertising campaign he started in 1975 to compete against
Coca Cola to gain market share, using heavily-advertised taste tests. It claimed based on Sculley's own research that Pepsi-Cola tasted better than Coca-Cola. The Pepsi Challenge included a series of television advertisements that first aired in the early 1970s, featuring lifelong Coca-Cola drinkers participating inblind taste test s. Pepsi's soft drink was always chosen as the preferred product by the participant; however, these tests have been criticized as being biased. The Pepsi Challenge was mostly targeted at the Texas market, because Pepsi had a significantly lowmarket share there at the time. The campaign was successful, significantly increasing Pepsi's market share in that state. At the time the Pepsi Challenge was started, Sculley was senior vice-president of United States sales and marketing operations at Pepsi. [Sculley, "Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple", pg 71-75]A slightly humorous fact is that Sculley himself took the taste test and picked Coke instead of Pepsi. [Michael S Malone. Infinite Loop. New York: Doubleday Business, 1999.]
Another interesting fact was that Sculley was married to Donald M. Kendall's daughter. Donald Kendall was the CEO and Chairman of PepsiCo from 1971 to 1986.
In 1977, Sculley was named Pepsi's youngest-ever president.
1983–93: the Sculley era at Apple
While chairman of Apple Computer,
Steve Jobs recruited Sculley from Pepsi, Jobs is reputed to have asked Sculley:"Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?" [cite web|url=http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/president/players/sculley.html|title=John Sculley|work=Frontline|publisher=WGBH educational foundation|accessdate=2007-12-13]
Apple chose Sculley because they wanted him to apply his marketing skills to the personal computer market, particularly to the
Macintosh . Fact|date=December 2007Sculley raised the initial price of the Macintosh to $2,495 from the originally planned $1,995, using the additional money for higher
profit margin s and expensive advertising campaigns. [ [http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Price_Fight.txt&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date&detail=medium&search=John%20Sculley Andy Hertzfeld, Article: "Price Fight" (October 1983)] ]The Lisa shipped, and had disastrous sales. While the Macintosh shipped and sold extremely well, it did not put the
IBM PC out of business, and some of the privileges of the elite development groups were trimmed, and projects were subject to stricter review for usefulness, marketability, feasibility, and reasonable cost. A power struggle between Jobs and Sculley had become readily apparent. Jobs became "non-linear": he kept meetings running past midnight, sent out lengthy faxes, then called new meetings at 7 am. After one such meeting in 1985, the Board of Directors lost patience and stripped Jobs of all operational responsibilities, three months after Jobs' 30th birthday.Fact|date=December 2007Microsoft threatened to discontinueMicrosoft Office for the Macintosh if Apple did not license parts of the Macintoshgraphical user interface to use in the Windows operating system. Under pressure, Sculley agreed, a decision which later affected theApple v. Microsoft lawsuit. Also while at Apple, Sculley coined the termpersonal digital assistant (PDA) referring to theApple Newton , one of the world's first PDAs. [ [http://www.ciber.com/ciber/30years/more.cfm?dataid=174&id=90 Ciber, Technology Milestone: Apple Newton 1993] ]In 1987, Sculley published his
autobiography , "Odyssey ". He gave each Apple employee a copy at Apple's expense, in the hope of inspiring "excellence". Shortly afterwards,Jean-Louis Gassée , Vice President of Product Development, gave each employee in his division a copy ofFred Brooks 's book "The Mythical Man Month ", in the hope of inspiring good sense in planning and carrying out engineering projects.Fact|date=December 2007The "Sculley Era" at Apple was characterized by market division and further subdivision, with a large number of models covering what critics called a too-finely subdivided range. Each production model was marketed under different names in each of several primary markets — home, education, and business; with time, each of these models generated upgrades and variations, which created unforeseen incompatibilities: keeping the operating system (The Macintosh System Software) compatible with all Macintosh models was a never-ending task. This strategy backfired, as it resulted in high engineering, manufacturing, and marketing costs, as well as market confusion. Buyers would look at similar machines in a store, each conceived for a particular market but usable elsewhere, and with comparable performance specifications, and become confused as to which product to buy. Too many products with similar specifications led to decreased
profit s, despite high gross margins.Fact|date=December 2007Given his apparent inability to effectively manage Apple's product line, Apple's board ultimately forced Sculley out. He was replaced by
Michael Spindler , who had been Chief Operating Officer. [http://nostarch.com/download/apple2_excerpt.pdf]Another side effect of Sculley's tenure was the destruction of Apple's engineering department. As the company grew, mid- and low-level managers within the company found it fairly easy to gain funding for practically any project. Apple became filled with these projects, many of which had little commercial potential. When money tightened in the early 1990s, this resulted in a sweeping round of
empire building , in which mid-level managers attempted to take over as many projects as possible in order to make their projects more difficult to discontinue. Between 1990 and 1995, very few products were successful, with the exception ofMac OS updates, while massive projects such asQuickDraw GX and PowerTalk were released in essentially unusable forms.Fact|date=December 2007In the early 1990s, at enormous expense, Sculley led Apple to port its operating system to run on a new microprocessor, the
PowerPC . Sculley later acknowledged this was his greatest mistake, indicating that he should instead have targeted the dominantIntel architecture. [ [http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?newsid=7045 MacWorld, "John Sculley Admits Intel Blunder" (2003)] ]Although Sculley asserted Apple's most important goal was to crack the business PC market, during his ten years at the helm, Apple failed to address the key complaint of business buyers about the Macintosh operating system: poor system stability caused by a lack of
memory protection andpre-emptive multitasking .Fact|date=December 2007In 1987, Sculley made several famous predictions in a
Playboy interview. [ [http://www.msu.edu/user/daggy/cop/bkofdead/pboyintv.htm Caskets On Parade - Playboy Interview Subjects & their Interviewers] ] He predicted that theSoviet Union would land a man on Mars within the next 20 years and claimed that optical storage media such as theCD-ROM would revolutionize the use ofpersonal computer s. Some of his ideas for theKnowledge Navigator would eventually be fulfilled, not by Apple itself, but by theInternet and theWorld Wide Web during the 1990s.1994–present: after Apple
Sculley turned his attention to
politics in the early 1990s on behalf of Republican Tom Campbell, who in 1992 was running in California for aUnited States Senate seat. Sculley hosted a fund-raiser for Campbell at his ranch in Woodside. Sculley had become acquainted withHillary Clinton , serving with her on a national education council. WhenBill Clinton ran for president, Sculley supported him. Sculley sat next to Hillary Clinton during the President's firstState of the Union address in January 1993. [ [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/president/players/sculley.html PBS.org - John Sculley - Interlocking business and political relationships] ]Only one business day after leaving Apple in 1994, Sculley signed on with Spectrum Information Technologies, a US$100 million
wireless communication s company. At the time Sculley joined the company, it was under investigation for fraud by theSecurities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Four months later, Sculley learned of the fraud investigation and resigned, filing alawsuit against Spectrum president Peter Caserta for damaging his reputation. [ [http://www.inc.com/magazine/19980515/1117.html Inc. Magazine, "Happiness and the Downwardly Mobile CEO", May 1999] ]In 1995, Sculley became an investment partner of Sculley Brothers LLC, a private investment firm in
New York City .Fact|date=December 2007 Sculley became the chairman ofLive Picture , aCalifornia -based company, in 1997, to oversee its push into high-quality, low-bandwidth imaging over the Internet. Live Picture was best known for its work in network imaging and as the inventor of zoomable images for the Internet. US$22M in venture capital was provided for the company. Sculley later left the company, but remained an investor. In 1999, Live Picture filed for federalbankruptcy protection as part of a plan to be acquired by MGI Software. [ [http://money.cnn.com/1997/09/11/technology/sculley_intv/ CNNMoney, "John Sculley rides again", September 1997] ] [ [http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.next.advocacy/browse_thread/thread/bfe4aab657b25cb0/b4da3428703cb9d3?lnk=st&q=Live+Picture+Inc+Bankrupt&rnum=1&hl=en#b4da3428703cb9d3 Google Groups, "Live Picture files for bankruptcy", May 1999] ]On
July 15 1998 , Sculley joined the board of directors of BuyComp LLC (now Buy.com), an Internet-only computer store.As of 2006 , Sculley is not listed as an executive at the company. [ [http://www.internetnews.com/ec-news/article.php/28971 internetnews.com, "John Sculley Joins BuyComp Board of Directors",July 15 1998] ]In 2000, Sculley partnered with Dennis M. Lynch to launch Signature21. In its first year, the two-man firm provided marketing services to an array of small to medium sized businesses. In 2001, Sculley and Lynch transitioned the company into a learning program for rising entrepreneurs. Months later, Lynch left the company, while Sculley continued to consult and work with small businesses, including InPhonic.
In 2000, Sculley joined the
board of directors atInPhonic , an online retailer of cell phones and wireless plans. His early leadership and enthusiasm [ [http://wbt.sys-con.com/read/40825.htm Robert Diamond, "When two heads are better than one"] ,May 2 2001 .] helped steer InPhonic towards its successful IPO in 2004. Sculley currently serves as the vice chairman of the InPhonic board of directors. In 2002, Sculley endorsed and invested in theWine Clip [ [http://www.thewineclip.com/cgi-bin/category.cgi?category=tech_pvr The Wine Clip Testimonials] ] , a wine accessory product, which claims to accelerate the aeration of wine by exposure to magnets.In 2003, Sculley helped found
Verified Person Inc. , an online pre-employment screening company. He currently serves on the board of directors.Fact|date=December 2007 In 2004, Sculley joined theboard of directors atOpenPeak , a maker ofsoftware for wireless consumer electronics, digital media, computers, and home systems. [ [http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?newsid=7770&page=1&pagepos=3 MacWorld UK, "John Sculley joins OpenPeak board",January 27 2004] ] In March 2006, Sculley was named Chairman of IdenTrust (formerly Digital Signature Trust Company) a San Francisco based firm focusing on verifying identity and boosting financial security. [ [http://www.identrust.com/ IdenTrust.com] ] In the same year, John Sculley became a Venture Partner at Rho Ventures.Before speaking at the Silicon Valley 4.0 conference, Sculley was interviewed by CNet in October 2003, where he explained the mistakes he made at Apple concerning the
Apple Newton andHyperCard . [ [http://news.com.com/2008-7351-5085423.html Dawn Kawamoto, "Riding the next technology wave"] ,October 2 2003 .] Also in 2003, Sculley was interviewed by theBBC for the television documentary "The World's Most Powerful" episode "Steve Jobs vs. Bill Gates", discussing his time at Apple during the 1980s as CEO. [ [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/worlds_most_powerful/3284811.stm BBC News, "Bill Gates v Steve Jobs",24 November 2003] ]Sculley has spoken at
Pop!Tech since its opening in 1997 every year except for 2005. [ [http://www.poptech.com/speakers.cfm?page=speaker_detail&id=158 Pop!Tech - John Sculley speaker biography] ]Footnotes
References
* John Sculley and John A. Byrne, "Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple", ISBN 0-06-015780-1 (
October 1 1987 )
* Owen W. Linzmayer, "Apple Confidential 2.0", pages 153–68, ISBN 1-59327-010-0 (January 1 2004 )
* Michael S. Malone, "Infinite Loop", ISBN 0-385-48684-7 (February 16 1999 )External links
* [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/president/players/sculley.html PBS.org - John Sculley Biography]
* [http://www.harrywalker.com/speakers_template.cfm?SPEA_ID=208 Harry Walker Agency - John Sculley Biography]
* [http://www.rhomanagement.com/venture_capital/about_vc/team/john_sculley.html Rho Ventures - John Sculley Venture Partner Biography]
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* [http://wbt.sys-con.com/read/40825.htm 2001 Interview with InPhonic vice chairman John Sculley by Wireless Business & Technology]
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