John Sculley Quotes

#1. No great marketing decisions have ever been made on qualitative data

John Sculley

#2. 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.

John Sculley

#3. It's suddenly practical to do very high quality video wirelessly over mobile devices, and we're just in the early days of that.

John Sculley

#4. I'm an optimist. You can't be an entrepreneur if you're not essentially an optimist, so I'm an optimist by nature.

John Sculley

#5. 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.

John Sculley

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

John Sculley

#7. 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.

John Sculley

#8. I remember going into Steve [Jobs]'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.

John Sculley

#9. When I left Apple, it had $2 billion of cash. It was the most profitable computer company in the world - not just personal computers - and Apple was the number one selling computer.

John Sculley

#10. My guess is that Apple won't just pass Microsoft in market capitalization, but will go way beyond it.

John Sculley

#11. Apple makes really good products, and Samsung makes really good products. It's really a two-horse race. Where I think Apple is exposed: the price points of Apple's products are just so high by comparison with Samsung's.

John Sculley

#12. Stay the course and keep building an integrated Apple ecosystem of iPhone + iPod + iMac + iTunes + App Store + Apple TV. No one has yet demonstrated they understand how to create an 'experience-based ecosystem' as well as Apple.

John Sculley

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

John Sculley

#14. We see healthcare shifting from a procedure reimbursement, where in this country doctors are reimbursed for how many procedures they conduct, to a world where people will be reimbursed for the outcomes - did the patient actually get better, and what was the total cost of the cycle of care.

John Sculley

#15. 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.

John Sculley

#16. I think that televisions are unnecessarily complex. The irony is that as the pictures get better and the choice of content gets broader, that the complexity of the experience of using the television gets more and more complicated.

John Sculley

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

John Sculley

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

John Sculley

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

John Sculley

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

John Sculley

#21. 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.

John Sculley

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

John Sculley

#23. 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.

John Sculley

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

John Sculley

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

John Sculley

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

John Sculley

#27. The launch of iPhone is very possibly bigger than the launch of the first Apple II or the first Mac. Steve Jobs's genius is his ability to use technology to create products that define fundamental cultural shifts.

John Sculley

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

John Sculley

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

John Sculley

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

John Sculley

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

John Sculley

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

John Sculley

#33. Apple and Samsung are selling in such high volumes, and they're vertically integrated more and more, that it's very, very hard for anyone to compete against Apple and Samsung in the high-volume part of the smartphone or tablet market.

John Sculley

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

John Sculley

#35. Ross Perot came and visited Apple several times and visited the Macintosh factory. Ross was a systems thinker.

John Sculley

#36. 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.

John Sculley

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

John Sculley

#38. The future belongs to those who see possibilities before they become obvious.

John Sculley

#39. 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.

John Sculley

#40. 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.

John Sculley

#41. The healthcare industry has never had a priority on user experience because there has been little competition. Prices have never been transparent.

John Sculley

#42. Over the years, I have developed a pretty good Rolodex.

John Sculley

#43. I think that the health care industry is so complex that it doesn't necessarily start with a single killer app. You go back to the early days of the personal computer - when I joined the industry, we really didn't know what the killer app was going to be.

John Sculley

#44. 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.

John Sculley

#45. 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.

John Sculley

#46. Health innovation, enabled by digital technologies to build big consumer service brands, is an incredibly interesting, complex problem to work on.

John Sculley

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

John Sculley

#48. 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.

John Sculley

#49. 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.

John Sculley

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

John Sculley

#51. Great marketing cannot sell a pedestrian product very well.

John Sculley

#52. The only thing I would say is, I think there's a lot of future value in Blackberry, but without experienced people who have run this type of business, and without a strategic plan, it would be really challenging.

John Sculley

#53. I didn't appreciate, coming out of corporate America ... what it meant to a founder, the creator of the Macintosh, to be asked to step down from the very division that he created to lead the very product that he believed was going to change the world.

John Sculley

#54. I never claimed to be a computer engineer, but I did train as an industrial designer, and I am a consumer marketer, and I am very comfortable dealing with complex businesses and complexity in general and simplifying it - basically a systems designer.

John Sculley

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

John Sculley

#56. Our primary goal in the consumer health service companies I back is helping them create an uncompromisingly great consumer experience.

John Sculley

#57. 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.

John Sculley