John Sculley

In Managers Not MBAs, Sculley is the example of a CEO who threw a company out of balance through overemphasis on a single function — marketing. Henry Mintzberg pairs him with Steve Jobs, who “did it with development,” to argue that “an overemphasis on any one function can send any company out of balance.” Marketing, like finance, is cast as a “hands-off” function: an obsession with finance is “playing tennis by watching the scoreboard instead of the ball,” and an obsession with marketing is “watching the crowd instead of the ball.” The lesson is that a business needs all its functions, but kept focused on hitting the ball rather than fixated on any one of them.

Context: John Sculley (b. 1939) was president of PepsiCo before becoming CEO of Apple from 1983 to 1993, a tenure remembered for his marketing background and his role in Steve Jobs’s 1985 ouster from the company.

Where this appears

• Managers Not MBAs — example, alongside Steve Jobs, of a CEO unbalancing a company by over-weighting one function (marketing)