John Sculley

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 PepsiCo (1977–1983), until he became chief executive officer (CEO) of Apple Inc. in April 1983, a position he held until October 1993. In 1987, Sculley was named Silicon Valley's top-paid executive, with an annual salary of US$10.2 million.

During Sculley's tenure at Apple, the company's sales increased tenfold from $800 million to $8 billion, while the period between 1989 and 1991 was regarded as the "first golden age" of Macintosh. Some attribute his success to the fact that he joined the company just when co-founders Steve Jobs's visions and Steve Wozniak's creations had become highly lucrative. Jobs and Sculley "clashed over management styles and priorities, Jobs focusing on future innovation and Sculley more on current product lines and profitability". Sculley won a power struggle leading to Jobs's ousting, and departed from Jobs's sales structure, instead deciding to compete with IBM in selling computers to the same types of customers. This strategy was initially successful due to the launch of fresh new Macintosh models for different segments which generated increasing profits. By the early 1990s, profits declined due to increasing competition from less expensive IBM PC compatibles running Windows 3.0. Sculley was ultimately 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 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 has invested in and has been involved with a number of high-tech start-up companies, and as of 2016 served as Chairman of the PeopleTicker and SkillsVillage.

Sculley was born in New York City, the son of Margaret Blackburn (Smith), a horticulturist, and John Sculley Jr., a Wall Street lawyer. Sculley and his brothers spent much of their childhood in Bermuda before moving back to New York. He attended high school at St. Mark's School in Southborough, Massachusetts.

Sculley received a bachelor's degree in architectural design from Brown University and an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Sculley began work at Marschalk Co. in New York City in 1963.

Sculley joined the Pepsi-Cola division of PepsiCo in 1967 as a trainee, where he participated in a six-month training program at a bottling plant in Pittsburgh. In 1970, at the age of 30, Sculley became the company's youngest marketing vice-president.

Sculley initiated one of the company's first consumer-research studies, an extended in-home product test in which 350 families participated. As a result of the research, Pepsi decided to launch new, larger, and more varied packages of their soft drinks, including the two-liter bottle Sculley worked with DuPont to develop. In 1970, Pepsi set out to dethrone Coca-Cola as the market leader of the industry, in what eventually became known as the Cola Wars. Pepsi began spending more on marketing and advertising, typically paying between $200,000 and $300,000 for each television spot, while most companies spent between $15,000 and $75,000. With the Pepsi Generation campaign, Pepsi aimed to overturn Coca-Cola's classic marketing.

In 1974, Sculley became president of PepsiCo's International Food Operations division, shortly after he visited a failing potato-chip factory in Paris. PepsiCo's food division was their only money-losing division, with revenues of $83 million and losses of $156.5 million. To make the food division profitable, Sculley improved product quality, enhanced accounts, and established financial controls. Within three years, the food division was making $300 million in revenues and $40 million in profit.

Sculley was best known at Pepsi for the Pepsi Challenge, an advertising campaign he started in 1975 to compete against Coca-Cola to gain market share, using heavily advertised taste tests. It claimed based on Sculley's own research that Pepsi-Cola tasted better than Coca-Cola. The Pepsi Challenge included a series of television advertisements that first aired in the early 1970s, featuring lifelong Coca-Cola drinkers participating in blind taste tests. Pepsi's soft drink was always chosen as the preferred product by the participant; however, these results have been criticized as being caused by Pepsi's sweetness, rather than its superior taste.

Sculley went political in the early 1990s on behalf of Republican Tom Campbell, who in 1992 was running in the California Republican primary to be the party candidate for a United States Senate seat. Sculley hosted a fundraiser for Campbell at his ranch in Woodside. Sculley had become acquainted with Hillary Clinton, serving with her on a national education council. When Bill Clinton ran for president, Sculley supported him. Sculley sat next to Hillary Clinton during the President's first State of the Union address in January 1993.

Sculley married Ruth, stepdaughter of PepsiCo president Donald Kendall in 1960, with whom he had two children. The couple divorced in 1965. In 1978, he married Carol Lee Adams, ex-wife of a former PepsiCo vice president, ultimately divorcing in 2011.

In 2013, Sculley married Diane Gibbs Poli, vice president and design coordinator for Wittman Building Corporation, and they live in Palm Beach, Florida.