An Interview With John Sculley, Part One

Several months ago, I had the chance to interview former Apple CEO John Sculley about his new ventures and ask a little bit about the history of Apple.

Sculley now lives in Florida, where he has become an investor in a number of companies including a mobile phone handset manufacturer. He has always been noted for his perspective on the industry and his business acumen. A lot of people blame him for forcing Steve Jobs out of Apple the first time around and fail to note that at the time the company had sales of $800 million. Sculley grew Apple to $8 billion before he left. In part one, he discusses entrepreneurship.

JCD: John, thanks for taking the time to chat. Let's begin with your new book and give it a quick plug. What is it called and what is it about?
Sculley: It's called Moonshot!, and as you know, moonshot is a metaphor that has been around for a long time in Silicon Valley. It says that when something happens that is so significant that the world is different after it happens than it was before, it's called a moonshot. We're picking up the metaphor of when President Kennedy, back in 1961, said we're going to put a man on the moon and return him safely within a decade, and they did.

JCD: Yes, and usually the people who are involved in moonshots walk away as billionaires rather quickly.
Sculley: Yeah, well this is not about that. I'm not the man who created this moonshot. And, the moonshot is not one product, but it is really several different technologies: cloud, mobility, data analytics, and, coming soon, the Internet of things, which are growing at an exponential rate, as you know. It's the derivative effect that I'm focused on, which is the market affect. That the market power is shifting from the large, incumbent companies to customers.

JCD: This is an ongoing trend it seems.
Sculley: Customers are more and more in control because they are paying more attention to the opinions and recommendations of other customers than they are to the messages of the incumbent companies. And, you can see that today, with so many ways in which things can go viral, that when customers have something really good to say about a product or service, it gets out to many other people very, very quickly. And that is really a game changer.

JCD: How is this different from word-of-mouth?
Sculley: It is word-of-mouth. Back in my era, in Silicon Valley, it was called word-of-mouth. When the Apple 1984 commercial came out there was no commercial Internet, and it was all verbal word-of-mouth and people said "gee, did you see that commercial?" They passed it on. Word-of-mouth today is technology enabled with all kinds of chat and photos and videos and other ways that people communicate.

JCD: Let's talk about entrepreneurs. If you were to coach an entrepreneur today, someone with new ideas—and you've seen a lot of them come and go over the years. What is the one thing that an entrepreneur does, or that you've seen them do over and over again, that they shouldn't do at all? Is there anything that comes to mind?
Sculley: First, to be an entrepreneur, you need to be an optimist. You need to believe in something. And, you hopefully become passionate enough about it that you will do whatever it takes to try and make it successful. Unfortunately, that can also make you blind to the fact that there may be obstacles in your way. Or your idea might not be as good in the eyes of the customer as in your eyes. Then we often become the victim of our own success. You get a little bit of success and it goes to your head.

JCD: What can you do about that?
Sculley: I think for entrepreneurs, you have to be scanning the landscape constantly. I remember one of the great lessons I learned working with Steve Jobs was something he called zooming, and he said "let's zoom out and kind of look at things beyond our main industry and then try and connect the dots." An example when I was working with him was when he zoomed out and connected the dots between beautiful calligraphy he had been exposed to at Reed College and the incredible engineering work stations, using a graphics interface, that Xerox PARC was working on at that time. Since he understood personal computers—because he produced the Apple II—he said "gee, imagine if you could connect the dots and take things that are in entirely different domains."

JCD: This is a form of creativity. [And this obviously led to the Lisa, then the Mac.]
Sculley: Well, that's what entrepreneurs have to do; they have to see things in different ways and connect the dots. Also, Steve's brilliance was he knew how to simplify. Many entrepreneurs don't know how to simplify. You know, they connect the dots, but they forget that you have to make it a great experience for the customer. Otherwise, the customer is probably not going to fall in love with it the way you might.

NEXT WEEK: Sculley's falling out with Apple and How Apple Saved AOL.