In 1983, John Sculley headed Pepsi-Cola. He was lured away by Steve Jobs.
Recruitment whose history and cinema have retained this little phrase:
"Are you going to sell sugar water all your life, or do you want to change the world with me?"
That's what Steve Jobs would have said to him then.
The two men then became friends, then enemies, when John Sculley witnessed the firing of Steve Jobs by Apple's board of directors in 1985.
He then took his place at the head of the group, before being fired in 1993.
At the time of Steve Jobs' dismissal, the second generation Mac, the Macintosh Office, made a commercial flop.
John Sculley quickly explains the main reason for this, according to him:
"This Mac was ridiculous, a victim of too much ambition".
To boost sales, Steve Jobs wants to lower the price. John Sculley opposes this idea of Steve Jobs by telling him that it will not change anything.
John Sculley later explained that he told Steve Jobs that:
"Steve, it's not going to change anything. The reason it doesn't sell has nothing to do with its price or its promotion. If you do that, we're in danger of sinking the company."
Steve Jobs strongly disagrees with John Sculley. Sculley tells Steve Jobs that he will talk to Apple's board of directors who will decide. Steve Jobs provocatively tells John Sculley:
"You can't do it."
John Sculley says to him:
"Look at me, I'll do it."
Apple's board of directors agreed with John Sculley, who explained that Steve Jobs was not a good leader at the time.
John Sculley also reverses his own incompetence:
"What would have happened if it hadn't ended up like this? I didn't have enough experience at the time to really understand how different it was to run a company that was starting an industry than to run a company that was just a competitor in an industry, and where you can't make a mistake, because if you lose, you're finished."
John Sculley also spoke in mid-2010 of his bitterness over this dismissal:
"I'm really angry at the board of directors. Because I think he understood how Apple worked before I came along, he understood Steve. He knew what experience I had and what I didn't have. And I really think they could have found a way to keep us together because we were very good friends."
When you start a company like Apple and take it public, you can lose total control. That's what happened to Steve Jobs, so his position was at the mercy of a decision by the board of directors.
John Sculley will then regret not having rehired Steve Jobs when he was still at the head of Apple :
"I didn't do it, it was a big mistake. I can't understand why I didn't have the wisdom to do it."
That's what happens when friendship and ego get mixed up in the working relationship between two people running a company as big as Apple.
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