John Sculley Regrets Fallout with Steve Jobs, Wishes He Could Turn Back Time

John Sculley, a former Apple CEO lured into the company by none other than Steve Jobs, has been interviewed recently on his lifetime experiences, including his time at Apple.

Sculley had been vice-president and president of PepsiCo when he got the CEO spot at Apple on April 8, 1983, a position he held until 1993.

Sculley became CEO of Apple after Steve Jobs had famously made him choose between selling “sugar water” for the rest of his life or changing the world.

“I appreciate more today that Apple was never just a business to Steve,” Sculley told FINS Technology. “Apple is Steve Jobs and Steve Jobs is Apple. That was entirely different from anything I had experienced coming out of Pepsi.”

Talking about Jobs’ relentless nature, Sculley said, “Steve was a guy willing to create his own rules and a genius at creating his own industry. I had never met anyone like that before. I only have more and more admiration for Steve as time goes on.”

While Jobs was persuasive and charismatic at the time him and Sculley were running Apple, some of  his employees regarded the man as an erratic and temperamental manager.

Computer sales had plummeted at the end of 1984 causing a deterioration in Jobs' working relationship with Sculley.

Following an internal power struggle and an announcement of significant layoffs, Sculley relieved Jobs of his duties as head of the Macintosh division at at the end of May 1985.

“I wish Steve and I hadn’t had a falling out,” Sculley said in his recent interview with FINS. “I wish I had gone back to Steve and said, ‘This is your company, let’s figure out how you can come back and be CEO’. I wish I had thought of that. But you can’t change history.”

Jobs famously said in an interview that being fired from Apple what the best thing that could happen to him at that particular point in time.

“The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life,” he said.