The man on the right is John Sculley, former Apple CEO (we can all be grateful that the man on the left dumped the bow tie for the turtleneck). Sculley took over at Apple in 1983, after Apple's co-founder and senior 'grown-up' Mike Markkula retired. The board didn't trust Jobs to actually run the company, and so, with Jobs's co-operation, they lured Sculley from Pepsi-Cola, where he had been a highly successful marketing executive. The two soon became locked in a power struggle, which Sculley won, forcing Jobs out. Sculley stayed for a decade, and while the company grew during that time it lost direction, failed to innovate successfully, and became, essentially, mediocre.
Last year, Sculley gave a remarkable interview about his time at Apple and his impressions of Jobs. With any animosity long-dissolved, Sculley is perceptive, candid, self-critical, and fascinating on the topic of Jobs's working methods. Better than anyone else I've read, he articulates what it is about Jobs that makes him different, that made him great. If you're interested you should really read the whole thing, but here's a taster:
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 [there's a photo here]. He just didn’t believe in having lots of things around but he was incredibly careful in what he selected. The same thing was true with Apple. Here’s someone who starts with the user experience, who believes that industrial design shouldn’t be compared to what other people were doing with technology products but it should be compared to people were doing with jewellery...
...Sony should have had the iPod but they didn’t — it was Apple. The iPod is a perfect example of Steve’s methodology of starting with the user and looking at the entire end-to-end system. It was always an end-to-end system with Steve. He was not a designer but a great systems thinker. That is something you don’t see with other companies. They tend to focus on their piece and outsource everything else. If you look at the state of the iPod, the supply chain going all the way over to iPod city in China – it is as sophisticated as the design of the product itself. The same standards of perfection are just as challenging for the supply chain as they are for the user design. It is an entirely different way of looking at things...Steve is a systems designer. He simplifies complexity.
Sculley says Jobs saw Apple as being a 'vertically-integrated ad agency'. Certainly, for companies that don't have a Jobs in charge, ad agencies should be aim to perform something like this role: thinking about the whole 'system' in which a product or service is embedded; seeing the whole of the moon. More to the point, it's how all technology companies need to think of themselves. Too often, the temptation is to focus on the product and its brilliant features, rather than where it fits into the network of relationships between people and technology. Talking of which - see also this fascinating explanation of why Nokia failed.
