Apple’s CEO Steve Job’s question, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or do you want to come with me and change the world?” made John Sculley leave PepsiCo and become the CEO of Apple. Sculley might not have been successful if changing the world but the contributions he made to Apple has been vital. During his tenure as the CEO of the company the sales of Apple increased from $800 million to $8 billion. Sculley is now a partner in Sculley brothers which is a private investment firm. In the year 1987, Sculley with a salary of US$2.2M was named Silicon Valley’s top paid executive.

Sculley joined Apple as the CEO in 1983. After Sculley joined the firm, in a few years time Steve Jobs was fired from Apple this left Sculley as the sole in charge of the firm. It was under John Sculley that Apple moved from its PC range to the manufacturing of laptops. Sculley’s tenure was also marked by a few over ambitious projects and non-feasible ones. For example the Aquarius quad core CPU which could never be released. In the year 1993 Apple had to replace Sculley because of falling profits and declining stocks. Although, Steve had to leave Apple soon after Sculley joined, yet Sculley has a vivid memory of Steve’s precise focus on design. Steve had a strong desire to make the technologies of Apple easy to use as the company was getting geared up to launch its first Mac in the year 1984. Sculley was recently in London to speak on the Hult Education Talks, hosted by Hult International Business School; there he said that all that happened in Apple and was significant was contributed by Steve Jobs. While talking to silicon.com Sculley also told that Steve never made any compromises.

Besides its stunning devices which have always attracted people Apple partly owes its success to the great advertisements. Steve wanted Sculley to give Apple the ideas of advertising which were used at PepsiCo and which helped Pepsi’s sales increase tremendously and take a lead over Coca Cola. Jobs admired the steps taken by Pepsi to take a lead against Coca Cola. He believed that the devices need to know how to get them sold just like soft drinks. Sculley has a belief that with the iPad and recently launched iCloud service Apple will surely lead the tablet market in the apparent future.