John Sculley Quotes

We expect teachers to handle teenage pregnancy, substance abuse, and the failings of the family. Then we expect them to educate our children.

People who take risks are the people you'll lose against.

If you spend too much time worrying about how other people perceive you, you'll never break the rules.

People are going to be most creative and productive when they're doing something they're really interested in.

You can't be No. 1 unless you think like No. 1. You have to appear like No. 1.

In the industrial age, the CEO sat on the top of the hierarchy and didn't have to listen to anybody ... In the information age, you have to listen to the ideas of people regardless of where they are in the organization.

Innovation has never come through bureaucracy and hierarchy. It's always come from individuals.

In many cases, jobs that used to be done by people are going to be able to be done through automation. I don't have an answer to that. That's one of the more perplexing problems of society.

No great marketing decisions have ever been made on qualitative data

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.

Nothing will divide this nation more than ignorance, and nothing can bring us together better than an educated population.

As a brand marketer, I'm a big believer in 'branding the customer experience,' not just selling the service.

Marketing strategy is a series of integrated actions leading to a sustainable competitive advantage.

I believe that crisis really tends to help develop the characer of an organisation.

The boards had to be beautiful in Steve [Jobs]'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.

Steve [Jobs'] 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.

If we hadn't put a man on the moon, there wouldn't be a Silicon Valley today

Innovation, I believe, is the only way that America will regain the initiative in a global dynamic economy.

Marketing is really theater. It's like staging a performance.

I remember going into Steve's [Jobs] 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.

Steve [Jobs] and I spent months getting to know each other before I joined Apple. He had no exposure to marketing other than what he picked up on his own. This is sort of typical of Steve. When he knows something is going to be important, he tries to absorb as much as he possibly can.

I have found that I always learn more from my mistakes than from my successes. If you aren't making some mistakes, you aren't taking enough chances.

What makes Steve [Jobs'] 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.

The real challenge is not to get people to remember more, but to get them to understand better. We're just now beginning to be able to show what we can implement with technological tools. I think our interest at Apple is to be the provider of the instruments that will help educators and students create and entirely new kind of learning than what we have now.

Healthcare has been the last major industry that hasn't been touched by technology in terms of productivity and consumer adoption in the way so many other industries have.

Implementers aren't considered bozos anymore

Microsoft's philosophy is to get it out there and fix it later. Steve [Jobs] would never do that. He doesn't get anything out there until it is perfected.

The news of my pregnancy spread like a forest fire in summer

If you repeat something long enough people believe it's what happened.

I wanted to be an industrial designer, so I went to business school for that, and I then went on to marketing at Interpublic Group of Companies, which was one of the first organizations to actually think about brand marketing. I worked on Coca Cola's account, and then I was recruited by Pepsi, and I ended up being Pepsi's first MBA. I was called the High Wire Act because I was in my 20s and I was given jobs of increasing responsibility that I was totally unqualified for.

Insatiable curiosity is infectious to everyone around you. We live in an era today where we can get the answers for everything. In my generation, going to school meant learning the answers. Today, education should be more about knowing what the right questions are. The answers come for free.

The characteristics that I look for when I'm looking for really good entrepreneurs to lead companies are you have to have an inquiring mind, you have to say there must be a better way to do things, and now with technology at a point where everything is possible, how do we turn the possible into the probable? And it all starts with a passion to do something really well, to solve a problem in a way that's never been solved before, and to have just an incredible work ethic, to be persistent.

Great marketing cannot sell a pedestrian product very well.

Steve Jobs was not an engineer: He was a brilliant individual with this ability to see around corners, to see things that other people couldn't see. I've learned over the years in the Apple that there are some really talented people who can take the same evidence, the same facts, and look at them and see them in a way that interprets those facts entirely different than most people do.

Those lessons that I got along the way are the ones that have shaped my life for the last 20 years.

There are just moments when all the stars are aligned for breakthrough products.

The iPod is a perfect example of Steve's [Jobs] methodology of starting with the user and looking at the entire end-to-end system.

Apple is so focused on its vision that it does things in a very careful, deliberate way.

When I was 5 or 6 years old, I never wanted toys; I wanted electrical parts so I could build things. And I was better at taking things apart and putting them back together, but I always had extra pieces left over, so I think it was an early warning that I was a better designer than an engineer.

It's an amazing time to be an entrepreneur because not only is the stuff getting more capable and powerful, but it's becoming more reliable and the costs are coming down dramatically. So you can go out as an entrepreneur and start a company on a credit card and go to AWS and a few other services and be pretty virtual and, who knows, you may be the next Steve Jobs.

I was recruited by Pepsi and put out in Pittsburgh, and I worked in the bottling lines, and then I was sent on to Phoenix, Arizona, where I also drove trucks and I put up signs, Pepsi signage, and I was then sent on to Las Vegas for a month of training, and then I finally ended up in Milwaukee. So I got a really hands - on introduction to the soft-drink industry. I was so appreciative of the fact that I was able to not only learn a business through what I learned at business school, but I was able to learn it with hands-on learning. I'm a huge believer in hands-on learning.

The new leaders face new tests such as how to lead in this idea-intensive, interdependent network environment

The Mac defined personal technology, and the iPhone defines intimate technology as a convergence of communications, content and location.

The Japanese always started with the market share of components first. So one would dominate, let's say, sensors, and someone else would dominate memory, and someone else hard drives and things of that sort.

Health care missed the PC and Internet revolutions, but it can't afford to miss the cloud and mobile revolution.

Apple no longer builds any products. When I was there, people used to call Apple "a vertically integrated advertising agency," which was not a compliment.

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.