John Sculley Quotes

People who take risks are the people you'll lose against.

Innovation has never come through bureaucracy and hierarchy. It's always come from individuals.

If you spend too much time worrying about how other people perceive you, you'll never break the rules.

You can't be No. 1 unless you think like No. 1. You have to appear like No. 1.

People are going to be most creative and productive when they're doing something they're really interested in.

No great marketing decisions have ever been made on qualitative data

In the industrial age, the CEO sat on the top of the hierarchy and didn't have to listen to anybody ... In the information age, you have to listen to the ideas of people regardless of where they are in the organization.

Marketing strategy is a series of integrated actions leading to a sustainable competitive advantage.

I have found that I always learn more from my mistakes than from my successes. If you aren't making some mistakes, you aren't taking enough chances.

Nothing will divide this nation more than ignorance, and nothing can bring us together better than an educated population.

As a brand marketer, I'm a big believer in 'branding the customer experience,' not just selling the service.

We expect teachers to handle teenage pregnancy, substance abuse, and the failings of the family. Then we expect them to educate our children.

Marketing is really theater. It's like staging a performance.

What makes Steve [Jobs'] 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.

The characteristics that I look for when I'm looking for really good entrepreneurs to lead companies are you have to have an inquiring mind, you have to say there must be a better way to do things, and now with technology at a point where everything is possible, how do we turn the possible into the probable? And it all starts with a passion to do something really well, to solve a problem in a way that's never been solved before, and to have just an incredible work ethic, to be persistent.

I feel most badly, though, [because] after 10 years, I was at the company, I wanted to go back to New York where I was from. Why I didn’t go to Steve Jobs and say, ‘Steve, let’s figure out how you can come back and lead your company.’ I didn’t do that, it was a terrible mistake on my part. I can’t figure out why I didn’t have the wisdom to do that. But I didn’t. And as life has it, shortly after that, I was fired.

I believe that crisis really tends to help develop the characer of an organisation.

Insatiable curiosity is infectious to everyone around you. We live in an era today where we can get the answers for everything. In my generation, going to school meant learning the answers. Today, education should be more about knowing what the right questions are. The answers come for free.

The real challenge is not to get people to remember more, but to get them to understand better. We're just now beginning to be able to show what we can implement with technological tools. I think our interest at Apple is to be the provider of the instruments that will help educators and students create and entirely new kind of learning than what we have now.

If you repeat something long enough people believe it's what happened.

The boards had to be beautiful in Steve [Jobs]'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.

Steve [Jobs'] brilliance is his ability to see something and then understand it and then figure out how to put it into the context of his design methodology - everything is design.

Innovation, I believe, is the only way that America will regain the initiative in a global dynamic economy.

If we hadn't put a man on the moon, there wouldn't be a Silicon Valley today

In many cases, jobs that used to be done by people are going to be able to be done through automation. I don't have an answer to that. That's one of the more perplexing problems of society.