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PODCAST: Former Apple CEO, John Sculley, On How To Think Like Steve Jobs And Market Like Pepsi

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Listen to the full episode here:

John Sculley is a marketing master. As president of Pepsi in the 1970s, he helped the scrappy soda start-up take a large chunk of marketshare from industry giant Coca-Cola. In 1983, Steve Jobs, chose Sculley to run Apple. The pair were best friends, and later business foes. Jobs was forced out of the company by Apple's board in 1985. Sculley remained Apple CEO until 1993. Four years later, in 1997, Jobs would return to Apple--a period Sulley calls Jobs 2.0--and the rest, is tech history.

Sculley, who now helps lead health start-ups like RxAdvance and Flex Pharma, joins The Forbes Interview podcast to share lessons and tips learned from more than four-decades of running some of America's top consumer companies.

Some highlights:

How Steve Jobs convinced Sculley to join Apple after Sculley initially turned down the CEO role:

He looked down for the longest time and then looked up and stared me straight in the eye. He said:  'Do you want to sell sugar water the rest of your life or come with me and change the world.' A few weeks later I was working at Apple. That was Steve Jobs. He had an amazing ability to find the right words, and with his charisma he could bend people’s answers.

Sculley's advice on building a world-class marketing strategy:

Great marketing is thinking back to what is the customer problem we can solve right away… Forget about the business plan. The business plan is really just a budgeting exercise that becomes political in most organizations. Instead, start with a customer plan--a customer plan says what's in it for the customer, how you engage the customer, monetize the customer, retain the customer, and think of the customer’s lifetime value. If you have all your metrics around doing something for the customer—you’ll end up making money.

Sculley on the state of today's start-up ecosystem:

If you are an entrepreneur and think about building a company, you don’t only first put it in the context of solving a customer problem, but also in the context that what used to take three years can be done in three months, and what used to take three months can be done in three weeks. Something that once seemed expensive is now inexpensive... what used to cost millions of dollars, can now be paid for with a credit card. The opportunities for entrepreneurs are amazingly different from anything we’ve seen in prior decades.

Follow me on Twitter: @Stevenbertoni