John Sculley
| John Sculley | |
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Sculley in January 2014
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| Born |
John Sculley III April 6, 1939 New York City |
| Residence | Palm Beach, Florida, U.S. |
| Alma mater |
Brown University (BA) Wharton School (MBA) |
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John Sculley III (born April 6, 1939) is an American businessman, entrepreneur and investor in high-tech startups. Sculley was vice-president (1970–1977) and president of Pepsi-Cola (1977–1983), until he became chief executive officer of Apple Inc. on April 8, 1983, a position he held until leaving in 1993. In May 1987, Sculley was named Silicon Valley's top-paid executive, with an annual salary of US$2.2 million.
Sales at Apple increased from $800 million to $8 billion under Sculley's management, although many attribute his success to the fact that Sculley joined the company just when Steve Jobs' visions and Steve Wozniak's creations had become highly lucrative. However, his stint at Apple remains controversial due to his departure from founder Steve Jobs's sales structure, particularly regarding Sculley's decision to compete with IBM in selling computers to the same types of customers. Others say that the "two clashed over management styles and priorities, Jobs focusing on future innovation and Sculley more on current product lines and profitability." But Sculley ultimately was forced to step down as Apple CEO because he was opposed to licensing Macintosh software and was talking to Goldman-Sachs about splitting Apple into two companies. When Sculley left in May 1993, Apple had $2 billion in cash and $200 million in debt.
Sculley is recognized worldwide as an expert in marketing, in part because of his early successes at PepsiCo, notably his introduction of the Pepsi Challenge, which allowed the company to gain market share from primary rival Coca-Cola. He used similar marketing strategies throughout the 1980s and 1990s at Apple to mass-market Macintosh personal computers, and today he continues to speak and write about disruptive marketing strategies. Sculley is currently invested in and involved with a number of high-tech start-up companies, including 3CInteractive, XL Marketing (now rebranded as Zeta Interactive), Inflexion Point, Mobeam, OpenPeak, x10 Credit, Pivot Acquisition Corp., nextSource and WorldMate. He is currently Chairman of the PeopleTicker and SkillsVillage.
Jeff Daniels portrayed Sculley in the film Steve Jobs, Matthew Modine portrayed him in the 2013 film Jobs, and Allan Royal portrayed him in the 1999 TNT film Pirates of Silicon Valley.
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