John Sculley, a former CEO of Apple and Pepsi, discussed why he chose to bring his management and technology expertise to the healthcare sector in a recent interview with Barron's.
Today, Mr. Sculley serves as chairman and chief marketing officer of RxAdvance, a cloud-based platform that helps hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and health insurers manage patients with chronic conditions who are living at home. However, he is perhaps best known for his clashes with Apple's late co-founder, Steve Jobs, over management styles and product strategy in the 1980s.
In fact, many credit Mr. Sculley with ousting Mr. Jobs from the company in 1985, though Mr. Sculley told Business Insider the story was a myth in 2015. Mr. Sculley led Apple from 1983 to 1993, and Mr. Jobs ultimately returned to the iPhone maker in 1997.
Since his departure from Apple, Mr. Sculley has built on his legacy as a serial entrepreneur and investor in consumer technology, data management and telecommunications companies, according to Barron's. He says a major shift in the technology landscape is the speed at which companies develop products — developers can now create something in two years that would have taken six years a decade ago.
"In tech, you have to adapt quickly, period," he told Barron's.
He also said his tenure in the industry helps him anticipate where technology is heading. For healthcare, he sees machine learning, precision medicine and robotics as holding untapped potential to redefine the space. At RxAdvance, for example, he hopes to disrupt the pharmacy benefit manager field by using computing power to manage expenses more efficiently.
"We can recognize what is big and what it takes to get there from here," he said.