Why Apple had to fire Steve Jobs then....

There is an article in the Daily Beast about John Sculley regretting firing Steve Jobs:

In the annals of blown calls, it ranks somewhere between the publishers who turned down the first Harry Potter book and baseball umpire Jim Joyce’s instantly infamous perfect-game flub last week. It was the spring of 1985, and the board of Apple Computer decided it no longer needed the services of one Steven P. Jobs.

Well, not necessarily - the reason is in another paragraph:

The key antagonist in the tech world’s biggest soap opera of a quarter-century ago: John Sculley, the Pepsi executive whom Apple’s board brought in as CEO to oversee Jobs and grow the company—similar to Eric Schmidt’s role with Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin—in 1983. A marketing whiz who had invented the “Pepsi Challenge” campaign, Sculley wrestled with low Macintosh sales and a need to bring some order to the creative chaos Jobs had unleashed. Sculley found that he couldn’t rein in Jobs—and decided he had to go.

Lest we forget, in the mid 1980's Apple had spectacularly lost the PC battle against Microsoft, released the Macintosh to universal disinterest and was shortly to inflict the Lisa on the world, Organisationally the company was in chaos, and it needed firm management to put in basic disciplines and good management processes - all that boring stuff. Its fairly well known that there comes a time in any startup where it has to shift its management culture, and often the founders are not ready at that stage to step up to the plate. In Mr Jobs case, to his eternal credit he went on a hero's journey to return ready to run the company again.

Sculley thinks they could have sorted out their differences:

Sculley says he accepts responsibility for his role but also believes that Apple’s board should have understood that Jobs needed to be in charge. “My sense is that it probably would never have broken down between Steve and me if we had figured out different roles,” Sculley says. “Maybe he should have been the CEO and I should have been the president. It should have been worked out ahead of time, and that’s one of those things you look to a really good board to do.”

From my experience of turnarounds I'd argue that if Mr Jobs had stayed at the company then, no matter how it was organised, he would have been a very disruptive influence (as he was, lets not forget) and it would not have been able to get all the basic corporate infrastructure that it needed to install to grow to the stage where he could come back and run he machine. I also think he learned a lot in those intervening years that made him a different person when he returned.

As to the Board though, do read this:

Board member Arthur Rock, a venture capitalist who helped found Intel, among other outfits, dubbed Jobs and his co-founder Steve Wozniak as “very unappealing people” in the early days. “Jobs came into the office, as he does now, dressed in Levi’s, but at that time that wasn’t quite the thing to do,” Rock told a little-noticed University of California, Berkeley venture-capital oral-history project. “And I believe he had a goatee and a mustache and long hair—and he had just come back from six months in India with a guru, learning about life. I’m not sure, but it may have been a while since he had a bath.”

Tut - measuring people by what they look like....wouldn't happen today as much, now would it?

Well.....?