Being Steve Jobs' Boss

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.

You talk about the "Steve Jobs methodology." What is Steve's methodology?

Steve, from the moment I met him, always loved beautiful products, especially hardware. He came to my house, and he was fascinated, because I had special hinges and locks designed for doors. I had studied as an industrial designer, and the thing that connected Steve and me was industrial design. It wasn't computing.

Steve had this perspective that always started with the user's experience; and that industrial design was an incredibly important part of that user impression. He recruited me to Apple because he believed the computer was eventually going to become a consumer product. That was an outrageous idea back in the early 1980s. He felt the computer was going to change the world, and it was going to become what he called "the bicycle for the mind."

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.

That went all the way through to the systems when he built the Macintosh factory. It was supposed to be the first automated factory, but it really was a final assembly and test factory with pick-to-pack robotic automation. It is not as novel today as it was 25 years ago, but I can remember when the CEO of General Motors, along with Ross Perot, came out just to look at the Macintosh factory. All we were doing was final assembly and test, but it was done so beautifully. It was as well thought through in design as a factory as the products were.

Now if you leap forward and look at the products that Steve builds today, today the technology is far more capable of doing things; it can be miniaturized; it is commoditized; it is inexpensive. And 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.

Actually today, that's what everybody is. That's what [Hewlett-Packard (HPQ)] is, that's what Apple is, and that's what most companies are, because they outsource to EMS—electronics manufacturing services.