Randall LaneForbes Staff
I edit Forbes Magazine, and posit on business, philanthropy--and food!full bio →
BUSINESS 208,471 views
John Sculley Just Gave His Most Detailed Account Ever Of How Steve Jobs Got Fired From Apple
Comment Now
Follow Comments
After years of silence, former Apple AAPL +1.52%CEO John Sculley has recently been moving more into retrospective mode. On Thursday, Sculley gave perhaps his fullest public account ever of the circumstances surrounding Apple’s firing of Steve Jobs, spending eight extemporaneous and uninterrupted minutes on the most infamous human resource decision in business history.
The setting was as unusual as the soliloquy: Bali, Indonesia, where 400 of the most powerful people in the world, including over 50 Asian billionaires, had gathered for 13th annual Forbes Global CEO Conference. Sculley was sitting on a panel on leadership, along with the likes of Hong Kong real estate tycoon Ronnie Chan and Rockefeller Foundation president Judith Rodin, when an audience member asked Sculley about the firing. The ballroom then sat in rapt silence as Sculley delved into details, cast blame and reflected on lessons learned.
The video can be seen here:
“I’m always surprised that people never ask the question: how could two individuals like Steve Jobs and I, who were supposedly inseparable — we were together all the time, we were great personal friends — how we could we end up in one of these amazing, celebrated clashes?”
The answer? “I really blame the board,” said Sculley, who was recruited from Pepsi in 1983 to bring order to Apple – and Jobs. “Because I think the board understood Apple before I came, they understood Steve. They knew what my experience was and what it wasn’t. And I really believe there could have been a solution to keep me and Steve working together, because we were really good friends up until that point.”
Sculley went into great detail on the circumstances leading up to Jobs’ dismissal. It stemmed, he said, from the introduction of the second-generation Mac, the Macintosh Office. The 1985 product launch, Sculley recalled, had been “ridiculed” as a “toy,” a victim of too much ambition for the relatively small amount of computing power then available (“it just couldn’t do very much”).
“Steve went into a deep depression,” Sculley said. As a result, “Steve came to me and he said, ‘I want to drop the price of the Macintosh and I want to move the advertising, shift a large portion of it away from the Apple 2 over to the Mac.”
“I said, ‘Steve, it’s not going to make any difference. The reason the Mac is not selling has nothing to do with the price or with the advertising. If you do that, we risk throwing the company into a loss.’ And he just totally disagreed with me.”
“And so I said, “Well, I’m gonna go to the board. And he said, ‘I don’t believe you’ll do it. And I said: Watch me.”
As outlined in Walter Isaacson’s biography, Jobs and Sculley presented their cases separately. Sculley told the crowd that Apple vice chairman Mike Markkula was assigned to study the issue and present a report. “Seven or eight days later, he came back to the board and said, ‘I agree with John, I don’t agree with Steve.’”
“Steve didn’t at that age know much about running companies. Apple had failed with Lisa, had failed with the Apple 3. The Apple 2 was near end of life, the company needed cash flow to fund development of the Macintosh.”
The board empowered Sculley to remove Jobs as head of the Mac division, and eventually, as the Apple founder continued to agitate, as chairman of the company. “What would have happened if we hadn’t have had that showdown?…I did not have the breadth of experience at that time to really appreciate just how different leadership is when you are shaping an industry, as Bill Gates did or Steve Jobs did, versus when you’re a competitor in an industry, in a public company, where you don’t make mistakes because if you lose, you’re out.”
“My sense is that there could have been a different outcome.”
“He was not a great executive back in those early days. The great Steve Jobs that we know today as maybe the world’s greatest CEO, certainly of our era, he learned a lot in those years in the wilderness.”
Sculley’s biggest regret? “I feel most badly, though, [because] after 10 years, I was at the company, I wanted to go back to New York where I was from. Why I didn’t go to Steve Jobs and say, ‘Steve, let’s figure out how you can come back and lead your company.’ I didn’t do that, it was a terrible mistake on my part. I can’t figure out why I didn’t have the wisdom to do that. But I didn’t. And as life has it, shortly after that, I was fired.”
There’s a lot more if you watch the entire video (see above).
What prompted Sculley’s long, contemplative answer? Sculley clearly didn’t appreciate Ashton Kutcher’s recent Steve Jobs biopic. (“For those of us who knew him well, [we’re] scratching our heads what they were thinking of when they wrote this movie,” he said earlier in the day.) Nostalgia, fueled by Jobs’ passing, surely plays a role. (“I was with him when he would cry, I was with him when he was scared.”) Chalk it up mostly, though, to the passage of time. “The older you get, the less inhibited you get,” the 74-year-old shrugged to me after the panel. Either way, the audience appreciated the candor. The man who fired Steve Jobs received a spontaneous wave of applause.
Follow me on Twitter: @RandallLane
Also on Forbes:
FORBES 547,227 views
Untold Stories About Steve Jobs: Friends and Colleagues Share Their Memories
This story appears in the October 22, 2012 issue of Forbes.
We know a lot about Steve Jobs, thanks to his willingness in the last years of his life to share stories with his biographer about what drove him to co-found Apple Inc. and reinvent the PC, music players, phones and tablets.
But there are plenty of “Steve” stories that you haven’t heard around, and a year after Jobs’ death on Oct. 5 at the age of 56, a few friends and colleagues shared their memories of the technology industry’s most notable luminary.
Hide The Porsches
Software engineer Randy Adams initially turned down Steve Jobs’ offer to work at NeXT, the computer company started by Jobs after his ouster from Apple. It was 1985. Adams wasn’t ready to go back to work after selling his pioneering desktop software publishing company. Within a few days Jobs was on Adams’ answering machine. “You’re blowing it, Randy. This is the opportunity of a lifetime, and you’re blowing it.” Adams reconsidered.
Adams, using some of the cash he’d earned from the sale of his company, bought a Porsche 911 at the same time Jobs did. To avoid car-door dings, they parked near each other–taking up three parking spaces between them. One day Jobs rushed over to Adams’ cubicle and told him they had to move the cars.
“I said, ‘Why?,’ and he said, ‘Randy, we have to hide the Porsches. Ross Perot is coming by and thinking of investing in the company, and we don’t want him to think we have a lot of money.’” They moved the cars around to the back of NeXT’s offices in Palo Alto, Calif. and Perot invested $20 million in the company in 1987 and took a seat on the board.
Adams also recalls the time Bill Gates showed up at NeXT for a meeting. It was the fall of 1986. The receptionist in the downstairs lobby called Jobs, whose cube was upstairs, to let him know that Gates was in the lobby. “I could see him sitting in his cube, not really busy. But he didn’t get up or call Gates up. In fact, he left him waiting in the lobby for an hour. That speaks to their rivalry.”
NeXT engineers, Adams said, took the opportunity to go downstairs and ply Gates with questions. “We enjoyed it and spent an hour talking to him until Steve finally called him in.”
Adams said he left NeXT after disagreeing with Jobs about the use of the optical drive in the NeXT workstation, which he felt would be too slow. Some time later Jobs convinced Adams to start a software business around NeXT, which he did with a $2 million investment from Sequoia Capital. But as the business was under way, Jobs called Adams again to let him know that NeXT was going to give up its workstation business and focus instead on software.
“He told me that the cost of hardware is coming down and we think it’s a commodity. I said, ‘Then why don’t you sell PCs?’ Jobs told me, ‘I’d rather sell dog s— than PCs.’”
Adams says he has many memories of Jobs from those days at NeXT – how Jobs, a vegan, would pass by engineers enjoying their Subway sandwiches and comment, “Oh, the smell of burnt animal flesh. How delightful.” In 1986, Jobs dressed up as Santa Claus and handed out $100 bills to employees. Adams also said Jobs was constantly telling employees who had screwed up or done something he didn’t like to “fire yourself.” Was Jobs serious? “Well, if you didn’t get a termination notice then you knew he was only kidding.”
A year after Jobs’ death, Adams, who went on after NeXT to help lead development of Adobe Acrobat and PDF and is a co-founder of the FunnyorDie.com site, says the tech industry is still feeling his loss. “His charisma, was like electricity – he was giving off this incredible force. It was inspirational. He lifted you. I used to believe when I was with Steve, you could do anything. You could change the world. When he died, a little bit of that feeling left me. There’s no one like him.”
Scuff Marks in the Mini-Store
In his first public appearance after revealing he had surgery to remove a tumor from his pancreas in 2004, Jobs met with a handful of reporters (including me) at the Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto, Calif. to unveil a new 750-square-foot “mini” store design. Half the size of the typical Apple retail stores of the time, the mini design featured an all-white ceiling, lit from behind; Japanese-made stainless-steel walls, with holes around the top for ventilation that mimicked the design of the PowerMac G5; and a shiny, seamless white floor made with “material used in aircraft hangars,” Jobs said at the time.
- Page 1 / 4
- Continue
TECH 20,286 views
Former Apple CEO Sculley Says Steve Jobs Considered Phone Market In 1984
Former Apple CEO John Sculley says Steve Jobs was thinking about whether to create an Apple-branded phone as early as 1984, the same year the company introduced its game-changing Macintosh personal computer.
“I remember we were working on Mac phones back in late 1984. Steve was thinking about those kinds of products back then,” Sculley said in an interview with CNBC TV18.
“He used to say, the most important things are not the things you build but also the things you don’t build. He was rigorous in the discipline of simplifying.”
Sculley, who left Apple in 1993 and now serves as a partner at Sculley Brothers, which invests in companies and entrepreneurs, says he doesn’t think a rumored lower-cost version of the iPhone would be “a compromise” on Jobs’ vision for the smartphone.
“I don’t think it would be a compromise to come out with a broader product line. I don’t think they will get into the $100 range of smartphones. What I would imagine is, and I have no insider information — they would improve their top range of products,” he said.
“One thing about Apple is they have these fanboys – as I always say sell to the people who love us. For example when they came up with iPad mini, everyone who had an iPad went out and bought a mini as well. If Apple comes up with a higher end phone with a bigger screen etc, you will see a lot of install base go and buy a further higher end phone…Apple is like BMW, and BMW doesn’t compete with the lowest price brands. I think Apple will do just fine. [Apple CEO] Tim Cook has done a terrific job of setting up the stage for some exciting products next year. I don’t think there would be a creative leap in the smartphone industry, and the industry is maturing and is stabilizing right now. But I am sure we will see a creative leap from Apple, maybe a TV or a wearable.”
Sculley also shared his thoughts on what company he thinks has the potential to be the next Apple. The answer: Amazon.
“Is there anyone out there who is the next Steve Jobs? I think Jeff Bezos is pretty close. He is very smart. He is extremely creative. He has completely reinvented the way in which commerce is done online.”
