Top 74 Quotes & Sayings by John Sculley

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.

I'm an optimist. You can't be an entrepreneur if you're not essentially an optimist, so I'm an optimist by nature.

Apple makes really good products, and Samsung makes really good products. It's really a two-horse race. Where I think Apple is exposed: the price points of Apple's products are just so high by comparison with Samsung's.

I never claimed to be a computer engineer, but I did train as an industrial designer, and I am a consumer marketer, and I am very comfortable dealing with complex businesses and complexity in general and simplifying it - basically a systems designer.

Health innovation, enabled by digital technologies to build big consumer service brands, is an incredibly interesting, complex problem to work on.

Timing in life is everything.

The healthcare industry has never had a priority on user experience because there has been little competition. Prices have never been transparent.

Implementers aren't considered bozos anymore.

Apple is so focused on its vision that it does things in a very careful, deliberate way.

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.

Over the years, I have developed a pretty good Rolodex.

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

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

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

I think that televisions are unnecessarily complex. The irony is that as the pictures get better and the choice of content gets broader, that the complexity of the experience of using the television gets more and more complicated.

Health care missed the PC and Internet revolutions, but it can't afford to miss the cloud and mobile revolution.

When I left Apple, it had $2 billion of cash. It was the most profitable computer company in the world - not just personal computers - and Apple was the number one selling computer.

The Mac defined 'personal technology', and the iPhone defines 'intimate technology' as a convergence of communications, content and location.

I think that the health care industry is so complex that it doesn't necessarily start with a single killer app. You go back to the early days of the personal computer - when I joined the industry, we really didn't know what the killer app was going to be.

It's suddenly practical to do very high quality video wirelessly over mobile devices, and we're just in the early days of that.

Ross Perot came and visited Apple several times and visited the Macintosh factory. Ross was a systems thinker.

The only thing I would say is, I think there's a lot of future value in Blackberry, but without experienced people who have run this type of business, and without a strategic plan, it would be really challenging.

Apple and Samsung are selling in such high volumes, and they're vertically integrated more and more, that it's very, very hard for anyone to compete against Apple and Samsung in the high-volume part of the smartphone or tablet market.

One thing about Apple is they have these fanboys - as I always say, 'Sell to the people who love us.' For example when they came up with iPad mini, everyone who had an iPad went out and bought a mini as well.

The future belongs to those who see possibilities before they become obvious.

Is there anyone out there who is the next Steve Jobs? I think Jeff Bezos is pretty close. He is very smart. He is extremely creative. He has completely reinvented the way in which commerce is done online.

Our primary goal in the consumer health service companies I back is helping them create an uncompromisingly great consumer experience.

Stay the course and keep building an integrated Apple ecosystem of iPhone + iPod + iMac + iTunes + App Store + Apple TV. No one has yet demonstrated they understand how to create an 'experience-based ecosystem' as well as Apple.

I think that Apple has revolutionized every other consumer industry; why not television? The complexity of the experience of using the television gets more and more complicated. So it seems exactly the sort of problem that if anyone is going to change the experience of what the first principles are, it is going to be Apple.

My guess is that Apple won't just pass Microsoft in market capitalization, but will go way beyond it.

There are just moments when all the stars are aligned for breakthrough products.

Healthcare has been the last major industry that hasn't been touched by technology in terms of productivity and consumer adoption in the way so many other industries have.

We see healthcare shifting from a procedure reimbursement, where in this country doctors are reimbursed for how many procedures they conduct, to a world where people will be reimbursed for the outcomes - did the patient actually get better, and what was the total cost of the cycle of care.

Everything at Apple can be best understood through the lens of designing. Whether it's designing the look and feel of the user experience, or the industrial design, or the system design, and even things like how the boards were laid out.

I didn't appreciate, coming out of corporate America... what it meant to a founder, the creator of the Macintosh, to be asked to step down from the very division that he created to lead the very product that he believed was going to change the world.

The launch of iPhone is very possibly bigger than the launch of the first Apple II or the first Mac. Steve Jobs's genius is his ability to use technology to create products that define fundamental cultural shifts.

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

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

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

Steve Jobs was not an engineer: He was a brilliant individual with this ability to see around corners, to see things that other people couldn't see. I've learned over the years in the Apple that there are some really talented people who can take the same evidence, the same facts, and look at them and see them in a way that interprets those facts entirely different than most people do.

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

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

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.

No great marketing decisions have ever been made on qualitative data

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

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

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.

I wanted to be an industrial designer, so I went to business school for that, and I then went on to marketing at Interpublic Group of Companies, which was one of the first organizations to actually think about brand marketing. I worked on Coca Cola's account, and then I was recruited by Pepsi, and I ended up being Pepsi's first MBA. I was called the High Wire Act because I was in my 20s and I was given jobs of increasing responsibility that I was totally unqualified for.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Those lessons that I got along the way are the ones that have shaped my life for the last 20 years.

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.

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.