Ten catastrophes: All-time worst tech industry executive decisions

by Jason Perlow [Source]

John Sculley, Apple Computer: Throwing out Steve Jobs

 

In 1985, Apple Computer was in the midst of a technology transition. In the previous year, the company had just launched its first Macintosh computer, which had replaced the Apple ][ and Apple III line it had been selling successfully for the last several years.

Founder Steve Jobs had recruited former Pepsi-Cola executive John Sculley to act as Apple's CEO, in order to help grow the company. While Jobs was considered to be a charismatic and dynamic employee at Apple and at the Macintosh division which was under his direct leadership, he was also erratic, difficult to work with and temperamental, and it was beginning to put a strain on his relationship with his team members as well as on the Board of Directors of the company.

Facing a sales slump due to overwhelming competition from companies like IBM and Compaq that were selling PCs and clones, Jobs' relationship with Sculley deteriorated which resulted in his ouster from the company he and Steve Wozniak founded.

The 11-year period that Apple continued on without Steve Jobs is universally considered to be a major low point for the company. Without Jobs' vision and guidance, innovation slowed and Apple underwent several leadership changes. Revenue and stock valuation plummeted, the company was on the verge of financial oblivion, and by the mid 1990's the company was in desperate need for a replacement to the aging Macintosh OS. 

In 1996, Apple purchased Steve Jobs' NeXT, which would serve as the foundation for what would become OS X and later on the iOS which powers the iPhone and iPad. Gil Amelio, the current CEO, was ousted in 1997 in a boardroom coup and Steve Jobs returned as Chairman and CEO.

Jobs would guide the company into the release of the iMac, the iPod, OSX and and x86-based Macs, and then later the iPhone, iPad and Apple TV, ushering in a new golden age for Apple.

Related:

Being Steve Jobs’ Boss - Confessions of the last man to manage the singular inventor!

Steve Jobs’ outlook on life at 31 after resigning from Apple [1986].

Being Steve Jobs' Boss - Confessions of the last man to manage the singular inventor!

Businessweek.com had done an indepth feature on former PepsiCo and Apple President John Sculley, who was the last man to manage Steve Jobs! It's one of the more insighful stories i have read about the duo. I posted some insights that John Sculley had about working with and managing Steve Jobs below.

 

Jobs and Sculley in New York City, 1984 DIANA WALKER/CONTOUR/GETTY IMAGES

 

Steve Jobs was 28 years old in 1983 and already recognized as one of the most innovative thinkers in Silicon Valley. The Apple (AAPL) board, though, was not ready to anoint him chief executive officer and picked PepsiCo (PEP) President John Sculley, famous for creating the Pepsi Challenge, to lead the company. Sculley helped increase Apple's sales from $800 million to $8 billion annually during his decade as CEO, but he also presided over Jobs' departure, which sent Apple into what Sculley calls its "near-death experience." In his first extensive interview on the subject, Sculley tells Cultofmac.com editor Leander Kahney how his partnership with Jobs came to be, how design ruled—and still rules—everything at Apple, and why he never should have been CEO in the first place.

 Sculley reminisces about his experience:

What makes Steve's methodology different from everyone else's is that he always believed the most important decisions you make are not the things you do, but the things you decide not to do. He's a minimalist. I remember going into Steve's house, and he had almost no furniture in it. He just had a picture of Einstein, whom he admired greatly, and he had a Tiffany lamp and a chair and a bed. He just didn't believe in having lots of things around, but he was incredibly careful in what he selected.

 

 

 

Everything at Apple can be best understood through the lens of designing. Whether it's designing the look and feel of the user experience, or the industrial design, or the system design, and even things like how the boards were laid out. The boards had to be beautiful in Steve's eyes when you looked at them, even though when he created the Macintosh he made it impossible for a consumer to get in the box, because he didn't want people tampering with anything.

 

 

Apple is famous for the same kind of lifestyle advertising now. It shows people living an enviable lifestyle, courtesy of Apple's products. Hip young people grooving to iPods.

 

 

I don't take any credit for it. Steve's brilliance is his ability to see something and then understand it and then figure out how to put it into the context of his design methodology—everything is design.

 

 

An anecdotal story: A friend of mine was at meetings at Apple and Microsoft on the same day. And this was in the last year, so this was recently. He went into the Apple meeting (he's a vendor for Apple), and as soon as the designers walked in the room, everyone stopped talking, because the designers are the most respected people in the organization. Everyone knows the designers speak for Steve because they have direct reporting to him. It is only at Apple where design reports directly to the CEO.

 

 

Later in the day he was at Microsoft. When he went into the Microsoft meeting, everybody was talking and then the meeting starts and no designers ever walk into the room. All the technical people are sitting there trying to add their ideas of what ought to be in the design. That's a recipe for disaster.

 

 

Everyone around him knows he beats to a different drummer. He sets standards that are entirely different than any other CEO would set.

 

He's a minimalist and constantly reducing things to their simplest level. It's not simplistic. It's simplified. Steve is a systems designer. He simplifies complexity.

 

The reason why I said it was a mistake to have hired me as CEO was Steve always wanted to be CEO. It would have been much more honest if the board had said, "Let's figure out a way for him to be CEO. You could focus on the stuff that you bring, and he focuses on the stuff he brings."

I'm actually convinced that if Steve hadn't come back when he did—if they had waited another six months—Apple would have been history. It would have been gone, absolutely gone.

 

Continue reading here.

Steve Jobs’ outlook on life at 31 after resigning from Apple [1986].

 

 

 

 

Steve Jobs' outlook on life at 31 after resigning from Apple [1986].

I came across one of Steve Jobs' lesser known excerpts / Quotes, it gives real insight into his outlook on life at least in his younger years. The following is excerpted from a piece Joe Nocera wrote about Steve Jobs for Esquire in 1986, when Steve Jobs was 31, he had just resigned from Apple and was starting his new company NeXT.

Jobs at NeXT. Photo via waybeta.com

 

“Whenever you do any one thing intensely over a period of time,” he says, “you have to give up other lives you could be living.” He gives a shrug that implies that this is a small price. “You have to have a real single-minded kind of tunnel vision if you want to get anything significant accomplished,” Again, the same it’s- worth- it shrug. “Especially if the desire is not to be a businessman, but to be a creative person...

But isn’t he a businessman?

“My self- identity does not revolve around being a businessman, though I recognize that is what I do. I think of myself more as a person who builds neat things. I like building neat things. I like making tools that are useful to people. I like working with very bright people. I like interacting in the world of ideas, though somehow those ideas have to be tied to some physical reality. One of the things I like the most is dropping a new idea on a bunch of incredibly smart and talented people and then letting them work it out themselves. I like all of that very, very much.” There is a note of excitement in his voice. “I’ve had lots of girlfriends,” he adds. “But the greatest high in my life was the day we introduced the Macintosh.”

And Apple?

“Apple,” he says slowly, searching for the right analogy, “Apple is like an intense love affair with a girl you really, really like, and then she decides to drop you and go out with someone who’s not so neat.” Lewin, who is sitting next to Jobs, immediately chuckles at the seeming absurdity of the comparison, and that makes Jobs chuckle too. But Jobs truly did love Apple; in a weird way it seems right that he should compare it to a passionate affair.

Mostly he speaks about Apple with more sorrow than anger. There was a time when he thought he would always be connected to it— taking sabbaticals from time to time, but always coming back. Coming home. He clearly regrets that that possibility no longer exists.

He will not say anything at all about Sculley, nor will Sculley speak publicly about Jobs; not long ago the Apple president, under contract to write his autobiography, simply could not bring himself to “tell all” about how he bested Jobs. But both men are obviously saddened by their falling out.

One mutual friend recently bumped into a limo driver who occasionally drives both men. “Whenever Sculley or his wife gets in the car,” the driver said, “the first thing they ask is, ‘How’s Steve?’ ”We have almost arrived in San Francisco. “I think I have five more great products in me,” Jobs says, and then goes off on a long, rambling discourse on the joys of working on computers at this particular moment in history. He compares it to what it must have been like to work for Henry Ford when the automobile was still in its infancy and the technological boundaries were there to be broken. “It must have been the most incredible feeling,” he says, “to know that this was going to change America. And it did!” He grins suddenly. “If we can create the kind of company I think we can, it will give me an extreme amount of pleasure.”

 

The New York Times has graciously made the full piece -- reprinted as Chapter 2 in Nocera's 2008 Book Good Guys and Bad Guys -- available here. Embedded below as well.

Nocera_Ch2[1].pdf Download this file