John Sculley Reveals How Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Completely Changed His Views on Business

John Sculley is the former CEO of Apple Computers who was hired by Steve Jobs in 1983. He’s best known as the man who ousted Steve Jobs From Apple in 1985. From there up until Jobs’ death, both men never repaired their relationship.

While Sculley at the time was hired for his experience, it appears that he was able to learn a few things from two young and rising tech titans at the time. He told Quarts in a newly released interview:

“I thought business was all about competition and winning. And then I remembered one time I was in the Macintosh lab with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs late at night, and Bill and Steve are talking about their ‘noble cause’ to empower knowledge workers with tools for the mind that would make the individual incredibly productive, and they would change the world one person at a time.

I said to myself, “I’ve never heard anything like this.” A noble cause. It was an entirely new way of thinking about business; we’d never talked about noble causes when I was in the soft drink industry. We talked about market share. So that insight that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had about a noble cause—and remember, most of the time they were arguing with each other, but the one thing they never argued about was the importance of this noble cause to change the world—and so that’s what really motivates me today.

That’s why I’m interested in disruptive innovation in what seems to be an unsustainable healthcare system in the US. It has everything to do with having a noble cause to completely rethink point-of-care, point-of-sale, particularly around the most expensive part of the health system, which is the 5% of the population who are chronic care patients who represent over 50% of the healthcare spend.”